What is National Military Appreciation Month?

Military Appreciation Month was introduced in 1999 by decorated Navy Captain and former Arizona Sen. John McCain. Shortly after its introduction, resolutions urging Americans to honor and remember U.S. service members during National Military Appreciation Month were passed by the Senate and House of Representatives. Since then, the month of May has been a time for Americans to commemorate and pay tribute to the service members who have sacrificed so much in the name of freedom.

What is celebrated during Military Appreciation Month?

While Memorial Day is the only federally observed holiday in May, the month consists of several other days set aside to honor those who serve and those who make sacrifices so that a loved one may serve.

Loyalty Day - May 1

Loyalty Day kicks off Military Appreciation Month on May 1. First celebrated in 1922 as "Americanization Day" and later renamed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower as "Loyalty Day," Congress defines this day as "a special day for the reaffirmation of loyalty to the United States and for the recognition of the heritage of American freedom."

Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) – May 8

Victory in Europe Day is a day to celebrate the end of World War II in Europe when the Germans unconditionally surrendered to the Allies on May 8, 1945. The day offers Americans an opportunity to reflect on one of the U.S. military's greatest achievements and their part in winning the war against the Axis powers.

Military Spouse Appreciation Day – Friday before Mother's Day

Military Spouse Appreciation Day allows Americans a chance to reflect on the sacrifices military spouses make in order to keep things running smoothly at home while their spouse is deployed, and to honor the support families give to service members. During President Joe Biden's 2022 proclamation, he said of military spouses, "On Military Spouse Appreciation Day and every day, we are grateful for the extraordinary service and sacrifice of America's military spouses.  May we continue to lift their voices, invest in their talents and respond to their unique needs in ways that ease their challenges and enable them to reach their goals and aspirations."

Armed Forces Day – Third Saturday in May

Armed Forces Day is a day set aside during Military Appreciation Month to honor active-duty military members. According to the Department of Defense, the U.S. currently has 1.29 million active-duty members. Whether serving in the U.S. or deployed out-of-country, this day gives Americans time to reflect on the sacrifices service members are currently making to keep the country safe.

Memorial Day – Last Monday in May

Memorial Day is a federal holiday in the U.S. While it can be a somber day full of grieving, it also allows Americans time to remember and honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifice while serving their country. As President Harry Truman said, "Our debt to the heroic men and valiant women in the service of our country can never be repaid. They have earned our undying gratitude. America will never forget their sacrifices." A common observance on this day is to place American flags on the graves of fallen soldiers.

Ways to support the military during Military Appreciation Month and beyond

• Attend events honoring the military. Many cities host Memorial Day Parades with parade floats and marching bands celebrating service members.
• Find a military organization or nonprofit to support. Consider donating or volunteering with an organization that supports military members and their families.
• Send a care package to an active-duty service member. Things like sunblock, cookies, card games and notes of support can uplift service members and remind them people back home are supporting them.
• Brush up on your history. Take time to read up on the many fascinating and heroic military stories that have shaped American history. Visit a military museum to get a close-up experience of what military service members have gone through and fought for. Being knowledgeable about the past can help you appreciate the present.

Taking a moment to express gratitude

Even though there will never be enough words to adequately convey our gratitude and admiration for our service members, we can set aside some time to pay tribute to the sacrifices they have made and continue to make on our behalf. During Military Appreciation Month, we have the ideal chance to express our gratitude to our service members and let them know how much we value what they do.

Even when changes were made as securely as possible, remote connectivity introduced risks that simply weren't there previously in the financial services industry, which has historically leaned heavily on protective measures like physical protections, firewalls and network segmentation. The use of noncorporate assets surged to enable remote workers, all the while firms struggled to provision, patch, update and manage mobile devices and laptops centrally for a remote workforce, increasing the threat posed by ransomware, credential theft and other cyberattacks.

It's clear now that the move to remote work or hybrid remote work is not a short-term work style. Nine in 10 executives envision a hybrid model going forward, according to research by McKinsey, and most employers expect their employees to be on site between one and four days a week. In the financial services industry in particular, nearly two-thirds of employees say they would prefer a blend of home, office and remote work, a recent survey found.

Given this outlook for the long term, financial services need to take steps now to secure their systems for the future. Here's how:

Step one: Understand what systems were affected

Many financial services organizations may find that they don't even know what networks and systems were opened, modified, augmented or changed during the pandemic. That's why a good first step is for the CISO or CTO to make a thorough assessment. Which of your systems did you change, both in terms of what could connect with them and what they could talk to? You may find that you don't know what you don't know. If that's the case, start with your most business-critical systems.

Step two: Understand how the systems were affected

Most organizations found that the shift to remote work necessitated adding remote access where it didn't exist before. With each of the systems you are assessing, what was changed related to access, identity and encryption? Did security protections change to facilitate a remote workforce or are there new systems connecting? Do the changes meet your current security needs, and are there processes and access still in place that are operating under an exception to your security policy?

Step three: Decide what you want to do about it

You may find that all of your systems are secure, that there are risks you're willing to accept, or that you need to remediate what you put in place during the pandemic. It doesn't necessarily mean going back to the old; rather, it's about adapting your new configurations to meet pre-pandemic security requirements, for example by putting in new controls, improving security, implementing two-factor authentication or removing technology altogether.

For many organizations, the decision of how to proceed hinges on their risk profile. Are you trying to protect against a remote unknown adversary, an internal actor such as a contractor or a rogue employee, or IT administrators within your organization? Each presents a different threat and necessitates a different set of security precautions. How you design systems depends on what you're most worried about as an organization—and the risks you are willing to accept.

How to adapt existing cybersecurity infrastructure for hybrid workforces

Although each organization is unique, there are some functions that are commonly affected by remote connectivity in the financial services industry:

• Secure identities: Organizations can use certificate-based identities, tokens or multi-factor authentication to ensure that remote workers are connecting securely—and that the people connecting to systems are who they say they are.
• Secure network communications: Financial services firms that had to open their networks to enable remote access can use encryption tunnels such as IPsec (a protocol suite that enable a computer to talk to another over an encrypted tunnel) to enable devices to communicate more securely.
• Device management: The first line of defense against any cyberattack, including Ransomware, involves making sure that systems are managed, updated, patched and protected with antivirus software. Additionally, consider implementing a device management solution like Microsoft Intune, AirWatch or MobileIron to ensure that all devices are up to date. Make a long-term plan for how your organization will update and refresh remote workforce devices as well as provision and send devices to new employees.
• Remote access and security: Financial services firms that previously relied on physical controls and firewalls to isolate network segments can leverage solutions such as bastion hosts to proxy access into secure payment processing networks.

Remote work, in one form or another, is here to stay. There's no such thing as a perfectly secure system, at least not one that functions, but by taking a pragmatic approach to network connectivity and security, balancing workflows with the risks the organization is willing to accept and designing systems accordingly, financial services firms can make their systems more secure for long-term hybrid work.

Your ideas are considered your intellectual property, a term used to define any creative capital owned by a business or an individual. Music, artwork, photography, and more are all forms of intellectual property that need to be protected. For businesses, intellectual property also includes logos and artwork, names, slogans, and unique text that are elemental to the business’ success.

For any aspiring or active entrepreneurs, protecting your business ideas will secure them in the future in case another entity attempts to steal or copy your work. You can protect intellectual property by filing a patent, acquiring a trademark or using a copyright. In the infographic below from LegalZoom, dig deeper to discover why trademarking your startup ideas will save you money and hassle long term as your business grows.

Infographic courtesy LegalZoom

In just a few months, almost all organizations will allow their employees to return to their offices after over a year of working from home. And even at that point, almost no organizations will have 100% of their teams in the same physical space five days a week.

Based on all indications, neither employers nor employees will abandon remote work altogether: Less than 1 in 5 business owners intends to return to pre-pandemic office conditions, and the majority of U.S. workers want to maintain some regular telework schedule going forward.

Most likely, we’ll all settle into a hybrid work environment where a portion of our team is in the office and a portion is working remotely on any given day. After a full year of working almost exclusively from our separate homes, this will be yet another disruption for our organizations to endure.

The good news is that this go-around we have time to prepare.

Mistakes made; lessons learned

Years ago, my company expanded to bring a couple out-of-state employees aboard for the first time.

We brought them into the office for their first week for orientation, training, and our traditional Friday breakfast cooked fresh by their new teammates in our office kitchen. Then we sent them home, confident that they had been successfully imprinted with our award-winning corporate culture which would continue to be magically transmitted to them over the airwaves.

If you guessed that both of these folks later quit, you’d be correct.

What we learned, the hard way, is that our corporate culture was deeply rooted in our physical office, and the routines and traditions we had built there. This is true for a lot of us, which is what made a sudden quarantine even more challenging from an engagement perspective. And when that’s the case, it is extremely easy for workforces to splinter into perceived groups of “us” and “them.”

In a hybrid work environment, the risk of developing such internal factions is high: You’ll have your permanent remote workers, those who are in the office every so often, those who are in the office frequently, and those who will be in the office day in and day out.

Each of these groups will necessarily experience our companies differently — this is simply the reality of hybrid work. The trouble creeps in when these “different” experiences become imbalanced, impersonal, or inequitable.

Based on the lessons from our past mistakes, and based on 30 years of serving the technology needs of law firms and associations, we’ve since uncovered a number of subtle culture-killers that, if left unchecked, can do serious damage to employee engagement and retention.

I’ll walk you through them below, along with how thoughtful policy and technology solutions can help flip a weakness into a strength.

Five ways hybrid work will undermine your corporate culture

1. Scheduled Meetings

The first potential culture-killer is your everyday internal meeting. After living on Zoom and/or Teams for a full year, we all know how to hold virtual meetings. While a screen full of tiny boxes can grow tiresome, each of the people in those boxes takes up the same amount of space, has the same means of contributing to the discussion, and experiences that meeting in the same way everyone else does.

Now, consider a meeting where half the participants are in the office, and half are at home. Will the office group join a video call from your conference room, where the remote folks are projected onto a small TV screen? Will the remote participants be able to distinguish who is speaking when? Do they have the same access to any whiteboarding or relevant visuals? How hard will it be for them to interject and be heard?

2. Unscheduled Meetings

Outside of formal, planned meetings, a return to the office means a return to spontaneous chit-chat that snowballs into meaningful conversations and innovative ideas. In some cases, you’ll be able to yell down the hall to any other stakeholders and have them join the discussion, and everyone will walk away on the same page. In most cases, at least one person will be left out.

Do you have a way to quickly pull more people into a conversation on the fly? How are the whiteboarding capabilities now? Is collaborative note-taking an option? If some people simply aren’t available, is there a place to share a full summary afterwards? A policy for how and when to do this? Or will one or two people be forced to chase down the information they need to get up to speed while the rest of the team carries on?

3. Team-Building

Looking beyond day-to-day meetings, our overall team- and relationship-building strategies also need reevaluation. Nine months into the pandemic, a Pew Research survey found that 65% of employees felt less connected to their co-workers. Those of us who have been used to building and maintaining relationships through in-person interactions and events have been struggling to translate those skills digitally. Some, viewing the pandemic as a temporary scenario, probably didn’t try all that hard to begin with.

If we continue to treat in-person activities as our default for team-building, with virtual participants “included” as exceptions that need to be accommodated, we are almost guaranteed to exclude a segment of our team, make them feel less-than, erode engagement, and risk turnover.

4. Coaching and Advancement

This is another one for managers. When your direct reports all report in the same way, evaluating performance is fairly straightforward. Over the past year, for example, we’ve all more or less settled into a routine of virtual delegation, collaboration, check-ins, and so forth. But what happens when you see one member of your team in person three times a week, another twice a month, and another never?

Will the person with the most face time get preferential treatment simply because they’re the most accessible? Will they naturally receive more coaching from you, and advance more quickly because of it? Will you develop an unconscious bias that the remote teammate isn’t as invested because you can’t physically see how hard they work every day?

5. Shadow Cultures

Lastly, we have the more insidious threat of what I’ll call shadow cultures. Say, in the spirit of inclusion, your in-office cohort shares photo after photo of all the fun things your team does in the office in Slack for your remote workers to see: meals shared, pranks pulled, kids and pets visiting, and on and on.

Behind the photos there’s plenty of silent hard work, open conflict, and all the other facets of a normal company that aren’t so photogenic. But your remote team doesn’t see this side, and they start to invent their own concept of your culture — one that is entirely separate from both them and reality — as a result. At that point, there’s no scenario that does not leave that employee feeling disconnected and dissatisfied.

Best practices for a strong, inclusive culture

Fortunately, we can head these challenges off with some thoughtful planning and a new technology tool or two.

Be intentional with your meetings.

For every internal meeting, make a habit of thinking through who needs to join, where they’ll be joining from, and how to empower each person to contribute effectively using the various technologies at your disposal. Opt for whichever format creates the most equivalent experiences, not what’s most convenient.

There’s a logistical element here as well—can you simplify meetings by having groups who regularly collaborate come into your office at the same time? (There’s an app for that.)

Upgrade your conference room.

You don’t have to invest tens of thousands of dollars in conference room technology, but you do need to consider solutions that will level the playing field for on-site and remote participants. Interactive whiteboards with app integration (like the Vibe) and high quality sound bar/camera combos with speaker tracking (like this from Poly Studio) will help your remote workers feel seen, heard, and able to fully participate.

Revisit your existing collaboration tools.

If you rushed to implement Slack, Teams, SharePoint, or any other real-time communication and collaboration tool, kudos — this was a smart way to keep your team connected. It’s time to take a deeper, more thoughtful look at these packages and all they have to offer in the way of features and integrations — because they offer quite a lot.

And make sure any “new” findings filter all the way through your organization, not just the savviest departments.

Get your team trained and aligned.

As you bring new tools into play, be just as thoughtful with the implementation as you were with the selection; make sure your team knows (a) how the thing works and (b) your company’s guidelines for when and how to use it. A mix of group training sessions (record these for new hires!), individual sessions, and how-to guides or infographics for reinforcement generally work well.

Your management team needs to understand the purpose behind the changes you’re making and the consequences of not taking them seriously. They also need to be made explicitly aware of factors like proximity bias that might influence their treatment of direct reports.

Experiment and solicit feedback.

Once you have your foundational procedures and technologies in place, you’re in for some trial and error; this is new territory, and we’re not going to achieve perfection no matter how many hypotheticals we anticipate. This is why the most critical element of success is to involve your team.

From formal company-wide surveys to spontaneous polls to pilot groups to one-on-one discussions, keep your finger on the pulse as you navigate this transition. Get your team’s input as you craft your strategies and collect their feedback once you try them out. And listen. Your team’s perception is the only reality that matters here.

Where to start

Our first order of business is to make sure we have a clear vision of what our workplace will look like once our teams are vaccinated and able to return safely. Who will work from where, and when?

From there, consider how the different people or groups in your company will experience your culture given the routines in place and tools at their disposal today. Will they get facetime with your leadership every single week? Will their only exposure to those outside their department be through a monthly all-hands video call where they can’t reasonably contribute? Will they fall somewhere in the middle?

Identify the spectrum at hand and where your culture has room to fall down.

As you begin to take action, I encourage you to be transparent with your team about the steps you’re taking and why. The more clearly you communicate your intended outcome, the more buy-in you’ll generate and the more useful feedback you’ll receive.

We’ve been presented with a new opportunity to show our people that they are, in fact, our most valuable asset.

I hope you’ll seize it.

However, 49% of workers went remote for the first time and only 20% received any tips on cybersecurity from their employers. Pair that with the security risks already inherent with remote work and remote access, and we get cybercrime jumping by 300% just in early 2020. Not only that, but attacks targeting remote workers were up fivefold within the first 6 weeks of lockdown.

Cybersecurity is a critical issue that needs a fast resolution to keep businesses from losing data and money, among other things.

For a step better than even multi-factor authentication, passwordless security replaces passwords completely with cryptography and biometrics. Along with risk-based authentication and frictionless login with zero out-of-band messages, passwordless security is the safest solution for the remote access business world.

Infographic courtesy Beyond Identity

1. You must always use a front sight focus.
2. You definitely won’t be able to see your front sight in a high-stress situation, so you shouldn’t waste your time practicing with your front sight.
3. Front-sight focus is too slow.
4. “I am focusing on the front sight!”

Let’s take a quick look at them.

Myth No. 1: You MUST always use a front sight focus.

I agree with this for bullseye shooting, 4H shooting, hunting non-dangerous game, and other specific situations. I also think it’s critical to practice front sight focus during every practice session and at the end of every string of fire (red dots are the possible/probable exception).

Because of the way the brain conserves resources, it is next to impossible to practice a simple version of a skill (unsighted shooting) and conjure up the ability to do a more complicated version of that same skill (sighted shooting) under stress.

The brain will default to the simpler version of the skill unless you have trained the more complicated version. And, it’s worth noting that if you practice both, you will have a much greater chance of being able to actually do both under stress.

But to bust the myth of allfront sight, all the time, I’ll bring up a couple of examples…

1. You have a gun in your hand while an attacker is striking you.
2. Following No. 1, you create 2-3 feet of distance and determine that the attacker is still a threat.

A front sight focus will most likely be a bad thing in both of these situations.

But that leaves A LOT of room between close contact shooting and shooting at 10-30 feet with/without sights.

Myth No. 2: You DEFINITELY won’t be able to see your front sight in a high stress situation, so you shouldn’t waste your time practicing with your front sight.

If you don’t actually practice using your front sight, it’s almost guaranteed that you won’t see your front sight in a high stress situation. (See No. 4 in a minute.)

The argument here has a few valid origins, despite the fact that there are hundreds of firsthand accounts supporting both sides of this argument. When that happens, it’s worth digging into why different people experienced different realities.

Part of the stress response is that your pupils dilate and it becomes more difficult to focus on things up close. As you know, everyone’s stress response AND their level of response to the same situation is different.

In addition, the less trained someone is, the more likely that they’ll experience focus-lock on the threat they are facing. That’s normal.

But just because you may not be able to see your front sight perfectly clear doesn’t mean you can’t see it and use it while it’s blurry.

Similarly, just because you don’t think you’ll use your front sight in a high-stress situation doesn’t mean you shouldn’t practice with it.

To begin with, what if the shooting situation you’re fed requires more precision than you’re capable of without using your sights? It could be a mythical hostage situation or, more likely, a slightly longer shot, or a shot where the threat is mostly behind cover and you only have a foot, knee, elbow, or shoulder visible.

There’s a bigger reason to use your front sights, even if you think you never will in real life…

When people shoot without sights with a laser pistol, with sim rounds, airsoft, other visible projectiles, or on targets/backstops where hits are obvious, they generally correct their aim based on where they see their prior round impacting.

It’s a self-correcting loop that allows people to shoot very well without sights in a very short period of time.

But it’s a highly perishable skill that requires the visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive systems to be integrated and calibrated.

And in a real-world self-defense situation, it’s incredibly likely that you won’t get the feedback you need to correct your aim.

Unless you have the ability to use your sights to call your shots and correct aim based on where your sights are aligned.

Which brings us to No. 3…

Myth No. 3: Front sight focus is too slow.

When you are focused on a threat and realize that it needs shooting, if you want to shift your focus to the front sight, it takes time. A minimum of .10-.15 seconds.

Your brain transitions what you’re aware of from the “before” image of the target to the “after” image of your front sight without showing the transition, but during that transition period, you are not aware (visually) of what is happening. When people try to flick their focus back and forth between the front sight and target, this blindness happens every time and is why you’re better off focusing on the front sight and letting the target blur.

This “blindness” is longer for some people than others. For some people, the muscles that change the shape of the eye aren’t used to shifting focus quickly…it’s like a 60-year-old who was a sprinter in high school who can’t sprint anymore. Tactical vision training can improve this. For others, the eyes move at different speeds and there is visual confusion until they get on the same page.

For others, their brain has a tendency to “overshoot” the focal length that they want when they shift focus. If the threat is 11 feet away and their front sight is 18″ away, their focus may go from 11 feet (overshoot 18″) and focus on 12″, then (overshoot 18″ again) and focus on 24″, and then finally settle on 18″.

The well-trained eye can shift focus from any distance to the distance of the front sight. This can be improved with tactical vision training or, in some cases, by wearing prism lenses occasionally.

When the visual system is working as it was designed, it’s common to see people making cold, sighted, first-shot hits (only hits count) quicker than they’re able to make hits with unsighted shooting. (Warmed up is another matter altogether. Once a shooter is warmed up and their senses are calibrated and integrated, point shooting is almost always faster and almost as accurate as sighted shooting…but there’s usually not a warmup period before a self-defense shooting.)

This is why it’s so, SO important to know how you perform cold in addition to how you perform when warmed up.

There are a few ways to handle this…pre-aiming is one. Another is to blend unsighted and sighted shooting together. The situation you’re fed may demand a shot faster than you can get focused on the front sight AND the backstop/surroundings/situation may support you making an unsighted shot or a shot where you’re aware of the sights and/or muzzle alignment, but can’t get the front sight in focus until after the first or second shot.

In any case, the speed that you can get the front sight in focus shouldn’t determine whether or not you use your front sight in practice…just HOW you use your front sight in practice.

Myth No. 4: “I AM focusing on the front sight!”

Oftentimes, when people think and say that they’re focusing on the front sight, they aren’t. They are mostly aware of where their front sight is in space, but they’re really focusing on their target or at a point between their front sight and the target.

All three focuses are fine…target focus, midpoint focus, and front sight focus…IF your targets are telling you that you’re making your hits. Ideally, you want to be able to do all three…but front sight focus is the base-level skill that makes the other two happen easily and quickly.

The problem comes in when people refuse to focus on the front sight because the target gets blurry when they do. So, they try to shift their eyes back and forth quick enough to get both in focus at the same time, not realizing that the whole .10-.15 seconds of blindness happens each time they shift their focus.

And then, when they miss or shoot large groups, they may not know why…or just guess. If a shooter doesn’t know where their sights were aimed as they pressed the trigger, then how do they know whether the miss was because of an aiming error, a trigger press error, or a gun problem?

I was a little slow figuring this out. I had to have shooters do dry fire into cameras and have shooters aim completely inert blue guns at my eye to see it. This is not possible with live fire and most instructors haven’t had the opportunity to experience this in a high enough volume to appreciate it. But when they do, they see that when most people THINK they’re focusing on the front sight, they aren’t.

Busting this myth and getting a shooter to actually focus on their front sight oftentimes causes big jumps in performance, very quickly.

In addition, a front sight focus is one of the most effective ways to eliminate variables and figure out why you’re not making the hits you want. It’s a diagnostic tool. A fundamental shooting skill. And it’s something you can always come back to if/when you miss with other sighting methods or when the demands of the shot are beyond what’s possible for you without using your sights.

And it’s one of the reasons why, a few years ago, I started experimenting with targets that draw focus and aim into the bullseye better than traditional designs — so that shooters could finally focus on the front sight long enough to get the benefits that front sight focus provides.

But I had no idea how big of an impact a simple target design would have.

Once I started seeing the change in shooters on the line and hearing back from shooters who were using the target at home for dry fire, I knew I had to create a splatter target version. You can check it out here now.

Because protecting both your building and infrastructure as well as the pedestrians around your commercial or outdoor space is critically important, many facilities have chosen to install bollards for increased safety and security.

What is a bollard?

A bollard is a round post and is typically embedded in the ground and used for safety or security purposes. Originally meant to be used for ship mooring, bollards are now used mainly to direct or control road traffic. This includes using them to obstruct the passage of motor vehicles, such as outside of storefronts, to separate paved walkways from paved motorways, to block off public parks or outdoor spaces, and more.

Types of bollards

Bollards are typically made out of steel but can sometimes be made out of concrete or other strong materials. There are a variety of different types and models of bollards, including collapsible posts, fixed bollards (embedded or surface mounted), parking bollards (collapsible or removable), and removable bollards (locking or non-locking). Additionally, there are options ranging from low-impact bollards used primarily for visual deterrence to heavy-duty, anti-ram security bollards used to prevent ram-raiding and pedestrian accidents.

Benefits of bollards

Bollards are typically spaced at 4 feet on center; enough room for pedestrians and bicycles to pass through, but limited enough to prevent vehicles from passing through. They are available in many different sizes and styles, and the type chosen depends on the end goal of the bollard.

Here are some benefits of the different types of bollards:

• Removable and collapsible bollards provide temporary restricted entry or limited access when needed
• Security bollards protect pedestrians from traffic to ensure safety in busy places
• Anti-ram bollards provide security for buildings and infrastructures from both accidental and intentional damage from vehicles
• Removable or low-impact bollards are effective for channeling and diverting traffic, as well as closing off roads and entries altogether
• Anti-ram bollards mitigate the risk of business owners and government agencies from being exposed to significant liability
• Anti-ram traffic control barriers provide 24-hour protection for people and property

Industries and locations that can benefit from bollards

Bollards can be used a variety of different locations and industries, including:

• Airports
• Bike paths
• Cemeteries
• Corporate offices
• Financial institutions
• Government buildings
• Golf courses
• Marinas
• Pedestrian bridges and walkways
• Residential areas
• Restaurants
• Schools
• Stadiums
• Storefronts
• Universities
• and more.

Regardless of the level of security your application or location calls for, essentially any storefront, commercial business, or outdoor space will benefit from the additional safety and protection that high-quality bollards provide.

Why do we need safety bollards?

Bollards are effective at protecting areas and people, which is why they’re so common in public spaces. Because there are so many different options for what kind of bollards to install, they’re ideal for many different uses, no matter if you’re trying to permanently secure a storefront against vehicles, protect pedestrians, or barricade off an area. Bollards are meant to keep people safe and structures protected — and that’s why they’ve become an essential part of perimeter security.

Impairment Measurement Marijuana and Driving (IMMAD), based in Quincy, Massachusetts, is a bioscience company working to fill the gap of limited technology to detect impairment to drive with marijuana use. IMMAD is collaborating with the Boston University School of Medicine’s Biomedical Forensics (BMFS) Program to do something about the risk of marijuana impaired drivers contributing to fatal crash rates.

HPLC-MS/MS technology in the forensic science lab at Boston University.

The BMFS team have found that tears are an excellent matrix from which to identify active and inactive cannabinoids. Further research is expected to demonstrate tears as being a more sensitive and specific measure than either breath or saliva. The science abstract discussed the early findings at a major forensic science conference this April. The paper will be at the Midwest Association for Toxicology and Therapeutic Drug Monitoring Virtual Conference.

Professor Sabra Botch-Jones spent the fall and winter working with one of her master’s-level graduate students, Allen Mello, to demonstrate efficacy of using the eye’s tears as a measure of marijuana cannabinoids in the body. Professor Botch-Jones and Mello worked on the hypothesis that because the tears have a large quantity of lipophilic/fat components and because cannabis/THC/marijuana adheres very well to fat, that the tears will be a more efficient and a better objective measure of cannabinoids with marijuana use than saliva or breath. Saliva and breath have very few lipid/fat components and do not adhere well or for long to marijuana cannabinoids. Breath as a water vapor is not likely to be capable of measuring cannabis consumption if the route of use was in edible form.

Bench work set up for the analysis of THC/marijuana at BU

IMMAD and Boston University measured the tears of volunteers having used their own legal adult use marijuana at the IMMAD research site in Quincy during the months of November, December and January.

“With the legalization of marijuana, there is a perception that it is safe to perform normal activities such as driving or working. This is not true, decades of research on marijuana’s impairing effects demonstrates that it is not safe to operate a motor vehicle, or other safety sensitive function, while using marijuana. Therefore, it is paramount that we conduct research and develop ways in which we can detect marijuana use and assess impairment,” said Professor Botch-Jones.

Unlike alcohol, there is no breathalyzer or standard field sobriety test currently in general use roadside by the police to measure an impairment to drive with marijuana. The more reliable means to determine recent use of marijuana is a blood test. The levels of cannabinoids in the blood do not have a linear relationship to functional impairment to drive and cannot, in general, be used effectively to determine if marijuana related impairment contributed to the crash. There are no roadside tests of breath currently in general use or approved by the FDA available to law enforcement to measure marijuana.

While there are tests of saliva in use in Canada, Europe, as well as states such as California and Michigan, they are not in use in Massachusetts. Developing an effective, accurate measure of marijuana in the driver’s system will be essential to understand how its use may or may not have contributed to a fatal crash. IMMAD already has the working prototype of technology to measure vision loss and dysfunction with marijuana use and this is predicted to be an effective means to determine the actual impairment to drive.

Dr. Denise A. Valenti, CEO and owner of IMMAD states, “IMMAD is committed to research and technology in support of the responsible use of marijuana. Use of marijuana temporarily impairs functions critical for safe driving.” The measure of the presence of cannabinoids in body fluids will confirm what is causing the impairment to drive. The use of tears may be an effective means to do this.

The analysis of tears relies on volunteers from the community who have been “opportunistically” dosing with their own legal adult use marijuana or medicinal marijuana after having had an initial intake screening visit without having used any alcohol or marijuana. Volunteers make a preliminary visit, without having dosed, to the IMMAD research facility in Quincy where the process is reviewed and the volunteer signs a research informed consent, standard protocol for human research.

The research coordinator then takes information about when and where the volunteer will be available after having dosed with their own marijuana product. The IMMAD research team then arranges transportation to the research facility by Uber or Lyft. Samples of tears are taken using simple swabs or pipettes, blood is drawn to compare with the tears and then the volunteer is driven to their site of origin by Uber or Lyft. The research has had approval by an accredited Institutional Review Board.

Boston University forensic science intern Allen Mello.

The completed study was part of Mello’s required research as part of the master’s level program. This academic program trains aspiring forensic scientists in a variety of disciplines applicable to both crime scene investigation and evidence analysis, skills crucial to today’s comprehensive forensic investigations. Professionals such as Mello are trained in the basic principles of forensic science with a strong biomedical and chemistry background, providing crucial expertise to forensic investigations.

After graduation, students are prepared to pursue a variety of career options in crime laboratories, medical examiner offices, law enforcement agencies, scientific instrument companies and hospital or biotechnology laboratories. All students complete a program of independent research culminating in a written thesis of publishable quality.

For interns, this type of research provides critical practical experience. Data collection and analysis takes place in the BMFS laboratories, other departments at BU or at internship sites such as crime laboratories or forensically relevant industries such as IMMAD. Mello received funding support for his internship research with IMMAD through the Intern Challenge program at MassLifeSciences. Mello developed analysis procedures for the tears along with his advisor, Sabra Botch-Jones. The analysis was done with the QSIGHT High Performance Liquid Chromatography/Tandem Mass Spectrometer.

IMMAD wishes to remind all adults; enjoy legal adult marijuana responsibility. Do not drive. IMMAD welcomes inquiries about education programs and how legal adult use marijuana consumers can become a research volunteer.

For more info, email Dr. Denise Valenti at deniseavalenti@gmail.com or call 617-320-2997.

In 2021, cybercriminals have developed a range of security threats that have the potential to target and harm any online business. These threats can breach your data, compromise it and even hold your entire business ransom.

Online businesses need to do all that they can to build a cybersecurity strategy that helps them thwart potential attacks, with estimates of damages totaling $6 trillion globally in 2021. A cybersecurity strategy will not only give you peace of mind, it will also help you establish trust among your customers and potentially save you money.

In this guide, we’ll be taking a look at the types of cybersecurity threats you face, as well as the tactics you can implement that will help to safeguard your online business.

Types of Cybersecurity Threats to Watch for

Online businesses that haven’t put in place cybersecurity measures face a number of threats in 2021:

Ransomware

Ransomware is a piece of software that is designed to compromise your entire computer system, encrypting your hard drives and preventing you from carrying out your work. The meaning behind the name “ransomware” is that attackers essentially blockade your access until you’ve paid a set ransom fee.

Ransomware has grown in popularity in recent years, and attackers are not discriminatory when it comes to who they target. Everyone is susceptible.

Phishing Attacks

Phishing attacks are one of the most common cybersecurity threats. They typically involve a fraudulent email that has been composed to resemble an entirely legitimate one. The idea is that an unsuspecting member of your team receives the email, opens it and clicks on a link.

Once the link has been clicked, it can lead to the installation of malware. Then sensitive data is released into the hands of the attackers, who can then do whatever they want with it, like make unauthorized purchases, steal funds, or commit identity theft. This data may include passwords and usernames, but it can also include personal data and financial information.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)

Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) essentially flood a business’ website or network with an almost infinite number of information and requests. The intention is to disrupt your operations and prevent you from working until, eventually, your server fails and shuts down.

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs)

Advanced persistent threats (APTs) are by their nature one of the most elusive online attacks because, as their name suggests, they are persistent and hard to prevent, usually because they’re so hard to detect.

Attackers will typically strike strategically with stealth attacks over a prolonged period of time. The attacks are subtle and take place over a number of stages, but the end goal is typically to steal data, disrupt your operations or even spy on your business.

This is How to Build Cybersecurity into Your New Business

To get started in securing your business, we recommend you get started with the below solutions:

Install & Enable a Firewall

A firewall monitors both your incoming and outgoing network traffic. It is able to spot suspicious data packets and block them before they cause trouble.

Firewalls are therefore essential network security devices that should form the building blocks of your cybersecurity strategy. They’re your first line of defense that thwart attacks while you’re able to concentrate on the core aspects of your business.

Because there are different types of firewalls that suit different sized businesses with different needs, here are some things to look out for:

Host-based firewall: This type of firewall protects just one computer, which means that each of your systems needs its own firewall. They’re generally the cheapest and simplest.

Network firewall: A network firewall defends numerous computers at the same time and are typically harder for attackers to get past.

Enterprise firewall: An enterprise firewall is especially useful for larger businesses with multiple networks and users. They tend to include advanced monitoring and VPNs and command the highest price.

Ensure That Network Equipment & Devices Are Updated Frequently

Often, simply updating your network equipment and devices can be enough to prevent an attack. Why? Because when a system isn’t utilizing the latest updates, it’s highly vulnerable to attackers who have developed new and advanced methods of attack. By updating your systems regularly, you’ll be in a more secure position.

This is where a patch management system comes in. A patch management system makes it easy for you to manage your security by updating all equipment and devices when updates are available. You should train your staff to update any software and components (if relevant) when prompted or, if possible, use automated patch management, which eliminates human action altogether.

Build a Cross-Functional Security Team

While it’s a good idea to employ a cybersecurity team to take care of your online security, that alone isn’t enough. Instead, you should look to build a cross-functional security team using the staff you’ve currently got.

In fact, your whole team can come together — including legal departments, HR, PR and marketing — to remedy attacks and notify suppliers and customers about any data breaches. Indeed, if there is an attack, it’s especially important that your PR and marketing team are well-versed in knowing how to inform your customers without causing alarm and panic.

This is known as an incident response plan, and it allows you to get to grips with a breach as soon as it’s occurred. If you and your team know exactly what actions to take in the event of a breach, you can go some way to minimizing its impact.

After all, while prevention is key, and while none of us want to be the victims of an attack, the reality is that online attacks happen. And then it’s a matter of what you do next.

Educate Your Team

Research shows that nearly one in two workers are responsible for putting their business at risk of a ransomware attack by opening suspicious emails. Negligence in the workplace when it comes to cybersecurity is rife, with 53% of staff admitting they’ve made their company’s systems more vulnerable.

It’s really important that you educate your team on cybersecurity, and especially of the need to update malware software when prompted. Train them in basic, essential security practices, such as strong password generation and how to detect a suspicious email.

Maintain Regular Backups

Frequently backing up your documents and data makes a lot of sense. There are a few good reasons to do this. One is that you’ll be able to retrieve data that would otherwise have been lost due to a data failure. Another is so that you’ll have more leverage if you’re the victim of a ransomware attack.

Attackers who hold businesses to ransom by stealing and withholding their data are in a much weaker position if the said business has maintained regular backups and thus has a copy of the data.

For best results, implement a process whereby backups are carried out on a consistent basis, ideally each day. If possible, retain multiple copies too, as this will give you even more flexibility.

Safeguard Your Online Communication

Online communication includes emails, but for many modern-day organizations, it also includes instant messenger apps. While instant messenger apps allow your team to ping messages back and forth as they plan and work on projects, they are also extremely vulnerable unless you utilize end-to-end encryption.

How vulnerable?

For example, your messages — and thus your data and key information — can be intercepted by hackers who have a bit of know-how.

End-to-end encryption blockades anyone without permission from accessing your messages, translating plain text into unreadable code ciphertext. And while you can download software made by other companies, it’s a smart idea to build an encrypted messaging app yourself so that you have full control over everything. This is essential for security and data protection.

Conclusion

Cybersecurity threats are constant, and they’re becoming more and more advanced each year. It’s important that you take the necessary steps now to put in place a cybersecurity strategy that will safeguard your new online business.

However, don’t stop there. Because cybercriminals are always looking for new weaknesses, you need to keep up to date with all the latest changes each year so that your defenses remain strong.

In March 2020, Jurash led MAP through an incredibly challenging period, dealing with the COVID-19 crisis, an event that brought manufacturing everywhere to a sudden halt. With several hundred thousand employees' lives affected by his decision-making, Jurash faced one of his most challenging periods of leadership. He shares more than 20 best practices effective leaders use to navigate during periods of crisis.

About What’s the BIG Idea?

What’s the BIG Idea? was born during the global pandemic of 2020. I spoke with a number of business leaders about how the pandemic was changing the ways they ran their organizations. I heard some amazing accounts of how the crisis brought out innovative and creative approaches to address the challenges these leaders were suddenly facing. I wanted to find a way to capture their authentic stories and energy and share it with others who might be similarly inspired to overcome their own set of challenges.

Each edition of What’s the BIG Idea? is a six to eight-minute conversational interview with a high achiever who is making a difference in his or her organization, field, or industry. What’s the BIG Idea’s host is Hank Boyer CEO and founder of the international management consulting firm, Boyer Management Group, and host of the No. 1 national syndicated business radio show, Executive Leader’s Radio. What’s the BIG Idea? is provided to viewers in partnership with the self-improvement team at Achiever’s Circle.

For more information about What’s the BIG Idea? or to inquire about being a guest, contact hank@boyermanagment.com.