Wildfires and residential fires cause millions of dollars in damages every year. As the weather becomes drier, the risk of brush and home fires increase.
While fire deaths are lower than the national average in New England, there is still a need to practice certain precautions to keep you and your family safe.
Here are a few fire safety tips to reduce the chance of fire.
6 Ways Employees Might Compromise IT Security
October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, so what better time to bring up the topic? Company owners want to be able to trust their staff. Yet, 52% of employers have noted that employees pose the greatest risk to company security. Considering that nearly 68% of businesses admit that their security risks are growing year after year, it is imperative that employers be able to rely on their staff to uphold security measures – even when no one’s watching.
Consider these six common ways employees compromise IT security. Once you understand where your employees need more guidance, you can offer it to them in a way that makes them feel valued and supported – a win for them and your company.
Among its other effects, COVID-19 is fueling the growth of online retail purchasing in New England. This means more deliveries of goods to the home, which in turn creates more opportunities for parcel thieves.
Criminals can just grab a package from the doorstep in broad daylight and vanish, without needing to break in. To combat this threat, online customers can leverage proven surveillance and high-tech solutions to catch or frustrate these criminals.
How to Disguise Home Security Cameras
Approximately 67% of all burglaries occurring in the United States target residential properties. This results in nearly 3.5 billion dollars in homeowner property losses each year. Of those burglaries, 15% occur in homes in the Northeast, and nearly half of those take place while the resident is at home.
This makes security cameras a very important tool for both the safety of the home and the homeowner. Yet, an effective camera isn’t enough. You also need effective camera placement.
In some cases you may not want your cameras right out in the open where they can be tampered with. Instead, you want to ensure that they are well hidden, yet still placed in prime position to capture any would-be intruder.
Here are a few great places to hide your indoor and outdoor cameras to ensure that they are as useful as possible while remaining undamaged by potential burglars.
Keep Spider Webs, Bugs or Insects From Security Cameras
High resolution surveillance cameras are key tools in protecting our New England homes and businesses from thieves and intruders. However, as reliable and proven as these solutions are, they require maintenance — and that includes preventing the camera lenses from being obscured by such obstructions as spider webs or insect nests.
Spider and insect interference may be a bigger problem than you might realize, particularly for homeowners with exterior camera-based security systems. Spiders do in fact habitually spin webs across lenses, as this industry blogs notes. This can create blind spots in your surveillance system, in effect disabling it.
Depending on your state, county, city or town, your child may be returning soon to the classroom. With the threat of COVID-19 remaining here in New England, you’ll want to take the best approach to ensure your child’s safety in and outside the school or playground.
The challenges for successful reopening and education are considerable, as a Mayo Clinic article on the subject notes. It states, “As schools reopen, they must balance the educational, social and emotional needs of their students along with the health and safety of students and staff in the midst of the evolving COVID-19 pandemic.”
The average person spends ten minutes per day looking for a lost item. That’s nearly 2.5 days per year spent trying to retrieve glasses, keys, wallets, and other valuables that have slipped out of sight.
What’s more, Americans spend over 2.7 billion dollars per year in replacement costs for lost goods. Yet, in 2020, there’s no need to waste money replacing what’s been lost. Here are several technology tools you can use to ensure that you always keep track of your most valuable possessions.
Every New England home or business owner wants to protect their property from burglars. Such invaders are a real threat today. According to the FBI, in 2018, the most recent full year with available statistics, there were 1.2 million burglaries in the United States. This represents some 17 percent of all property crime.
Naturally, you can take basic steps to defend yourself, such as locking doors and windows when you are absent, alerting neighbors if you are going on vacation, and so on. To take it a step further, however, try to think a bit like a burglar and develop your defensive strategies accordingly.
Roughly 250 New England homes out of every 100,000 are burglarized each year. Massachusetts residents alone have about a 1 in 79 chance of becoming the victim of a property crime.
If you want to ensure that you do not become part of that statistic, you’re not alone. Homeowners are looking for better ways to secure their property – that don’t come with a hefty price tag.
Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to achieve greater home security that don’t involve a lot of additional investment. Often, some creative thinking matched with wise decisions are all it takes to ensure that your home is safe from would-be intruders.
As a New England business owner or manager, you probably have questions about security that you weren’t sure how to ask. Here we have assembled a list of common, reasonable questions to help guide you in the future as you evaluate new (or existing) security solutions.
