Glasgow Property Letting has a combined expertise of over 50 years in residential sales and lettings. They are widely acknowledged as property experts by both customers and industry peers.

GPL have been a customer for a number of years and have started to use more and more of our services. A year after becoming a client GPL decided to start working with NovaBytes for their Microsoft 365 needs. We were able to assist them with what they needed and other areas that helped improve the security and the productivity of the business.

Glasgow Property Letting provide their landlords and tenants with exceptional service and strive to make sure everything runs smoothly.

Unfortunately, the staff at the company had started to receive a large volume of phishing emails, potentially due to the fact that they were growing in size and were becoming more-and-more publicly known. Managing Director Colin MacMillan said “we were getting a lot of them and on a near daily basis”.

These phishing emails were becoming a problem as they were starting to become more-and-more targeted and particularly stealthy, using tactics such as typo-squatting. These types of email attacks, no matter how alert or ‘clued-up’ your staff members are, are seriously difficult to detect, usually requiring specialist software to avoid. Michelle ODonnell mentioned “we were seeing a lot of them and obviously really conscious of the ones we weren’t able to spot, some of the more well-disguised emails”.

On top of this, GPL was starting to bring on new members of staff to manage the positive growth demand they were experiencing. They had come to a point where they now needed to define security policies such as Disaster Recovery and what happens if a staff member went AWOL with their devices.

It was determined in a consultation that Glasgow Property Letting would benefit from a solution encompassing the three main areas of cyber security: awareness, technology and policy.

NovaBytes first carried out an in-depth scan of the MS365 email inboxes and produced a report an all the existing threats that posed a risk to the company security. To remove the existing risks and to stop any further risks coming into the inboxes the NovaBytes team deployed Barracuda Email Protection. Barracuda Email Protection now protects the business from the 13 main email threat types including Spear Phishing and Account Takeover using AI technology.

Unknown to a lot of companies, data stored on OneDrive or SharePoint are not backed up and are therefore not entirely secure. In fact Microsoft actually states in it’s own terms and conditions that users should employ third party software to run secure backups. The Barracuda license we provided to Glasgow Property Letting also includes use of Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup.

NovaBytes deployed the Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup solution onto the MS365 environment and applied the correct policies to ensure the right data is being backed up at the right times. Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup has provided an additional layer of data security as the company OneDrive is now backed up to a secondary cloud location. Not including OneDrive, the company data is now stored in 2 separate backup locations.

Since Glasgow Property Letting were starting to grow their team, it was essential that they started securing their company devices and access onto company resources. Microsoft Intune now protects the data on any company devices that may go missing as they are able to be locked and wiped remotely. This also allows the management team to effortlessly onboard new staff when they join the business and the new staff experience a very streamlined welcome into the company. Likewise, if a staff member did ever go AWOL, their access to important company resources such as OneDrive and Outlook can now be removed in one click.

A Disaster Recovery plan has been put in place which has been thoroughly tested. In the event of a breach or ransomware attack, there is a well-defined plan-of-action that will get them up-and-running again. Pro tip – this plan has been printed off so it can be utilised even if they cannot access the cloud or even their computers and laptops.

A company-wide Multi Factor Authentication policy has also been put in place. This protects each staff members Microsoft account from unauthorized access and is set up for token-use as opposed to text messaging which is far more easy to intercept. MFA is a baseline Cyber Security tactic but it is often very difficult for companies to deploy and to force each staff member to have to do.

Cyber Security Awareness training given to the Glasgow Property Letting team has now given them the knowledge they need to be on the look-out for cyber attacks including malicious emails and the do’s and don’ts of protecting company data. Training on areas such as how to identify any sort of email threat, how to protect your company data and 101’s such as how to generate strong password and store them securely have proven massively useful to the team.

The combination of new security training, technology and policy implemented by NovaBytes has massively enhanced the standard of Cyber Security for the company. Manager Michelle ODonnell said that “we really can sleep easy at night knowing that NovaBytes has us as protected as possible. Whereas before we were always a bit worried, we now have that peace of mind that we are doing every we can to make sure we’re stopping cyber attacks wherever possible”.

“Glasgow Property Letting have been delighted by the service. NovaBytes go above and beyond”. – Michelle ODonnell, Manager