IT Blog

Best practices keep your firm billable when April deadlines stack up, and a single login or network issue can derail a critical filing day.

The annual tax season pressure only amplifies the risks from increasing cyber threats and system vulnerabilities, making a reliable and secure network foundation essential for meeting client deadlines and maintaining your firm’s reputation. 

According to the FBI’s 2024 Internet Crime Report, reported cybercrime losses hit a record and rose sharply year over year; the latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report also highlights growing pressure on internet-facing systems and remote access paths.  

Florida firms face an extra twist: storm-related disruptions and high-volume sectors such as real estate and hospitality can create sudden spikes in portal usage and remote connections. Your brand rests on discretion and reliability.  

One breach can undo years of trust. Many firms run modern apps on network foundations with blind spots.  

A general Network Health Assessment (NHA) gives leadership a clear picture of the current network and access environment, so you can prioritize what to fix first. It is a diagnostic, not a cybersecurity program. 

Best practices that protect billable hours in the busy season

In March and April, e-file queues surge, reviewers jump between client portals, and remote access runs hot. If the Virtual Private Network (VPN) saturates or Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) behaves inconsistently, staff reach for workarounds that slow delivery and raise risk.  

What to do now: validate the basics that prevent “just this one” shortcuts—consistent MFA on remote access and portals, clean firewall rules, and up-to-date edge devices and VPN software. A general NHA helps leadership see where policy and reality drift under peak load. 

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Mini-checklist — Controls to verify this quarter

        ✅ MFA is available on all remote access, administrator accounts, and client portals. 

        ✅ Firewall and access-control reviews within the last six months; retire any “allow-all” legacy rules. 

        ✅ Edge devices and VPN firmware are updated on a documented schedule. 

Ransomware: limit impact and speed recovery

Ransomware and credential-driven intrusions continue to rise, putting sensitive client data and billable hours at risk. Best practices focus on limiting impact and recovering quickly: backups that cannot be altered, restore tested end-to-end, least-privilege access, and simple network segmentation that keeps the most sensitive client data isolated.

A general NHA confirms whether these fundamentals exist in practice—not just on paper—and highlights the highest-value fixes for the next budget cycle.  

Best methods for remote work and client portals

A familiar scene: April 12, 10:30 p.m. The e-file queue spikes, the VPN hits capacity, MFA retries loop for two reviewers, and they fall back to email “just this one.” That shortcut is where delay becomes exposure. 

What to do now: treat performance and security as one. Define baseline latency and throughput for remote paths, require MFA and basic device health checks on portals and Software as a Service (SaaS), and ensure monitoring can spot unusual access quickly. A general NHA ties capacity, access policy, and monitoring together so it fixes the root causes. 

If your client portal stalls during a filing rush, what shortcut would your team take—and what risk would that create? 

Compliance and expectations: what partners and clients now ask

Regulators and clients expect more than a policy binder. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 provides a common language—identify, protect, detect, respond, recover—to align business priorities with risk.

For tax-preparing firms, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Safeguards Rule now includes breach notification to the FTC in defined cases, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Publication 4557 urges written plans to safeguard taxpayer data.

What to do now: map current controls to NIST CSF 2.0, run at least one tabletop incident exercise per year, and track a small set of operational metrics you can show to partners. 

What leadership should review each quarter?

A short, business-friendly dashboard keeps committees focused: 

• MFA coverage covers around ninety-eight percent of users in scope. 
• Critical updates on edge systems are applied within about two weeks of release. 
• Successful, end-to-end restore tests for core systems with very high pass rates. 
• Staff phishing-simulation failure rate was kept to a low single digit. 

Conclusion

Best practices are not busywork; they protect trust, billable hours, and reputation—especially during Florida’s peak workload and weather-related interruptions. The turning point is visibility.

A general Network Health Assessment is the first step to replacing assumptions with evidence, closing the gaps that matter, and strengthening the client experience.

Request a general Network Health Assessment and get a clear, prioritized path your partners can stand behind. 

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