The Macnamara Blog

Dangers of CEO Fraud
Macnamara blog

CEO Fraud: Don’t Let It Be You

CEO fraud is a highly targeted scam where criminals impersonate senior leaders to pressure staff into making payments or sharing sensitive information. This article explains how these attacks work, the warning signs to look out for, and the practical steps organisations can take to reduce the risk through awareness training, strong approval processes, MFA and regular security reviews.

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Windows Update
Best practices

What Is Patch Tuesday?

If you have ever seen a message asking you to restart your laptop, relaunch Edge, or reopen Teams and thought, “Why now?”, you are not alone.

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Copilot Studio
AI Agents

Getting Started with Copilot Studio

Artificial Intelligence is becoming a major part of modern business, and more organisations are starting to look at AI not only as a trend, but as a real productivity tool. One of Microsoft’s most powerful platforms in this space is Copilot Studio.

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Passkeys Vs Passwords 2 med
Best practices

Leave Passwords in the Past: Why the NCSC Is Backing Passkeys for Login Security

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has delivered a clear new message: “Leave passwords in the past – passkeys are the future.” In April 2026, the NCSC formally updated its guidance to recommend using passkeys as the default way to log in wherever services support them, instead of traditional passwords (even those paired with multi-factor authentication). This is a major shift in cyber security advice, and overturns decades of password-centric best practices.

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AI Comparison
AI Agents

AI Chatbots Comparison – Not All The Same

In recent years, AI has transitioned from a term used rarely to hearing it used in almost every conversation. Studies have shown that one in six organisations in the UK use AI in the workplace. This is because AI can automate tasks like drafting emails, summarising meetings and generating report. Some AI models are ‘multimodal’, meaning they can work with text, images, voice and video, while others are ‘unimodal’, built for one type of input like just text.

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AI Agents

Start Your Day With A Coffee, Not Your Inbox

Every morning starts the same way: open the inbox, scroll through messages, try to figure out what actually matters. Instead of spending the first 30 minutes reading emails, I built a simple morning assistant that gives me a quick inbox briefing. Now I know exactly what needs attention — before my coffee even gets cold.

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AI Agents

Copilot 365 Agents and Your Company Data

Most companies already have big amounts of data stored across Microsoft 365 — in SharePoint sites, Excel files, Word documents, and presentations. The challenge is not access to data, but the time it takes to work with it. This project looks at how Copilot 365 agents can help turn existing company data into usable insight faster.

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Making Sense Of Information Security
Best practices

Making Sense of Information Security – Online Course

In this series of 5 short tutorials, ‘Making Sense Of Information Security’, Ciaran delivers a step by step guide on getting to grips with this at times tricky concept. Aimed at office managers, we cover areas such as how to get senior management buy-in, how to undertake a risk assessment, how to approach treatment of those risks, your responsibilities to data subjects under the GDPR, and more.

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copilot-logo
Cloud Services

Enhance Productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot

AI tools are transforming how people approach their work, but online ‘free’ tools such as ChatGPT are not secure for businesses to use, and you should never enter any confidential or personal information into free online AI Services. This information can be used to train the AI and make it available to other users, and may constitute a data breach.

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ISO27001
Macnamara News

ISO 27001 From The People Who Implemented It

Achieving ISO27001, the gold standard of information security, is no mean feat. We’re incredibly proud of the achievement but we could have only done it with the help and engagement of everyone on the team.

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ISO27001
Macnamara blog

ISO 27001 – We Are Now Certified!

We are exceptionally pleased to announce that as of 14th October 2024 we are now fully and officially ISO27001 certified, a process we started a little over a year ago. We’ve always taken information security seriously, and have been certified with Cyber Essentials and other standards from IASME since 2015. But it’s always been an ambition to go for the internally recognised Gold Standard.

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Cyber Essentials 2023
Best practices

Is Your IT Support Cyber Essentials Certified?

Cyber Essentials is the minimum security baseline that all companies should aim to achieve. It checks to ensure that the very basics are covered, such as MFA on all Cloud service accounts, no admin rights for day-to-day use, and that security updates are installed promptly. If you are seeking to certify your own organisation, you should definitely ensure that your IT Support – who likely have far more access and control over your company data than you do – has at least this basic benchmark certification.

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DLP Icon
Best practices

Data Loss Prevention Policies in M365

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies in Microsoft 365 (M365) are useful security measures designed to monitor or prevent legitimate, inadvertent or malicious sharing of sensitive information outside of an organisation. As companies have moved away from on-premises servers for file storage towards M365 SharePoint and OneDrive, more and more are using it to save all their company data. But many business are not using the full range of functionality and background security features that make M365 a truly powerful modern tool for work and collaboration.

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Best practices

How To Set Up Signatures In Outlook

Email signatures are important and have a number of purposes. A well designed signature can be a real benefit to your company brand. They also provide all your contact details, can be used to help with marketing campaigns, and if you’re a business, provide important required information about your company registration. Here’s some guidance on adding signatures in Outlook.

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wifi
Best practices

How To Get Best Experience From Your Wireless Access Point

We all know that Wi-Fi can be much more convenient for your office setup than connecting everything via cable, and as Wi-Fi speeds and connectivity get better, more offices are switching to wireless. However, many people have concerns that wireless is less reliable than cabled, and they worry that they will struggle with weak signals or frequent disconnections. This blog will provide you with all the knowledge you need to get the best wireless experience and keep you at your desk rather than under it, fiddling with cables.

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copilot-logo
Information Management

Copilot for Microsoft 365

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is here and in general release. This post is a summary (not by Copilot, but by us!) of some introductory documentation from Microsoft Learn on what it is, how it works, and how you can incorporate it into your Microsoft 365 experience.

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AI Support 09
Macnamara blog

IT Support vs IT Security – Are You Getting The Service You Deserve?

Small businesses are just as vulnerable – if not more so – as larger organisations to cyberattacks, data breaches, and other IT-related issues (including simply poorly maintained equipment) that can compromise their operations, reputation, and profitability. They also need an occasional helping hand with some of the more everyday helpdesk issues that arise, be they problems, or simply helping to get new staff set up on the systems.

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copilot-logo
Macnamara blog

Copilot and AI in Windows 11

Over the last 2 years AI has taken the tech world by storm, and for good reason. With the release of AI models such as DALL-E and ChatGPT, we have seen what AI is truly capable of and this is just the beginning.
Microsoft is keen to utilise this breakthrough in technology and is introducing a seamless integration of popular AI features into Windows itself. No more creating accounts on various platforms, or even downloading large models manually and using funky command lines (looking at you Stable Diffusion), it will all be at your fingertips within Windows.

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