Why You Should Prioritize Your Technology Gaps

Technology is an unavoidable component of most businesses, helping them achieve their goals and vision. However, if you are not cautious, technological flaws could allow cybercriminals to access your network and cause harm to your company. Technology auditing is the solution to this problem.

A technology audit can assist you in better understanding and identifying gaps in your organization’s security, compliance, and backup postures. But if you don’t have a background in IT, the results of a technology audit can be confusing. You may be overwhelmed by the number of items that need to be refreshed or replaced, and you may not know where to start.

Having a managed service provider (MSP) by your side can help you avoid these stumbling blocks. An MSP can provide you with a prioritized list of the most urgent to least urgent gaps, allowing you to decide how to proceed and allocate funds.

Why should you prioritize your organization’s technology gaps?

Here are some reasons why prioritizing technology gaps is critical:

To fix the most critical gaps immediately

 

Following an audit, you may discover hundreds of vulnerabilities, prompting the question, “Should all of these be fixed at once?”

 

To improve on a major highway, you wouldn’t close every lane at the same time. Instead, you would first block and repair the most damaged one during non-peak hours. The same is true for vulnerabilities, and it is always better to bridge the most critical one first.

 

Bridging all the gaps at once is rarely practical, both financially and in terms of time and effort. Furthermore, if you prioritize a lower-priority vulnerability first, cybercriminals can swoop in and exploit critical flaws in the blink of an eye.

 

To promote better budgetary decisions.

Budgets, when properly planned, can serve as a tool to assist you in meeting organizational objectives.

Randomly allocating funds to bridge gaps will neither help defend against threats nor be a wise budgetary decision. Instead, prioritize gaps and distribute financial resources based on vulnerability severity.

To improve control over transformation and upgrade

Timely upgrades and associated transformation are crucial for a business to stay competitive in constantly evolving business landscapes. Even so, it is critical to maintaining control over such transitions. Otherwise, it could lead to confusion and poor decisions, ultimately harming your company’s growth.

 

Get a better understanding of upgrades and transformation by prioritizing gaps and systematically bridging them based on their severity.

To avoid overburdening key stakeholders.

Tending to all gaps at once can overwhelm your employees, in turn lowering their productivity and deteriorating customer service. Avoid this to the greatest extent possible. If your customers and employees are dissatisfied, your business can suffer serious setbacks such as employee attrition, customer churn, accidental data breaches, and so on.

Collaborate for success

 

Not sure where to start? An MSP can help you prioritize technology gaps to optimize IT platforms and help you get the most out of your technology investment, all while ensuring uptime and productivity.

 

Contact us to learn how we can help your organization successfully prioritize technology gaps to achieve targeted goals sustainably.

 

Phone: 361-977-9244

Email: [email protected]

 

 

Why Adopt a Comprehensive Backup and BCDR Strategy

Why Adopt a Comprehensive Backup and BCDR Strategy

Being a business owner is challenging. You have to deal with multiple problems at once and effectively solve each of those. It would be best if you also had the foresight to arm your business with the right tools and solutions to deal with any issues that might arise later.

One such issue that you must always focus on is data loss/data corruption and business disruption. 

If you’re wondering why this should be a priority, take a look at these statistics:

  • For SMBs, per-hour downtime costs could be as high as $50,000.
  • One-third of customers will end their association with a business following a severe disruption or data loss incident.
  • Failure to protect data can draw penalties of up to 4% or more of company turnover.

Always remember that data loss/data corruption and business disruption could happen due to various reasons such as:

  • Natural disaster
  • Hardware failure
  • Human error
  • Software corruption
  • Computer viruses

Therefore, as a responsible business owner, you must prepare your business to deal with unexpected interruptions that cause downtime and productivity dips. The best way to do this is by adopting a comprehensive backup and BCDR strategy. 

What Is a Comprehensive Backup and BCDR Strategy?

A comprehensive backup and BCDR strategy emphasize the need for various technologies working together to deliver uptime. It even highlights technologies associated with cybersecurity. 

Protects All Systems, Devices, and Workloads

Managing all systems, devices, and workloads efficiently, securely, and consistently can be quite a challenge. Mistakes, errors, mishaps, and outright failures across backup and recovery systems could happen simultaneously and could even lead to severe downtime or other costly business consequences. That’s why it is essential to have a reliable and secure solution to back up and protect business data and information and business systems, devices, and workloads.

Ensures the Integrity, Availability, and Accessibility of Data

The complexity of IT, network, and data environments that include multiple sites—cloud, on-premise, and remote—makes monitoring and protection difficult. It negatively affects the integrity, availability, and accessibility of information and all IT network assets. Hence, deploying tools or systems that cover all IT and network infrastructure (remote, cloud, and on-site) simultaneously, with the same level of protection and security, is vital.

Enables Business Resilience and Continuity

A comprehensive and realistically achievable backup and BCDR strategy prioritizes, facilitates, and ensures the continuity of business operations. It represents a business’ resiliency against downtime or data loss incidents. 

Prioritizes Critical Protection and Security Requirements Against Internal and External Risks

No backup or BCDR solution can be effective if your business does not proactively identify and rectify internal and external risks. It would be best if you had tools that focus on internal and external threats through constant monitoring, alerting, and tactical defense to empower your backup and BCDR strategy.

Optimizes and Reduces Storage Needs and Costs Through Deduplication

Experts estimate that humans produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day.4 From a business perspective, enormous amounts of data pose serious storage and budgetary challenges. What makes things worse is the existence of multiple, unnecessary copies of the duplicate files. Therefore, adopting deduplication can identify data repetition and ensure that no identifiable data is stored unnecessarily.

Manages Visibility, Unauthorized Access, and Fulfills Data Retention Requirements

Your business data must never be visible to every employee in the same way. There must be policies and tools to ensure that employees access only data essential to complete their tasks. Also, unauthorized access must be identified and blocked immediately. This isn’t just essential for the success of backups and BCDR but also necessary to maintain compliance with all regulatory mandates related to data protection and retention.

Comprehensive Backup and BCDR For Your Business

Adopting a comprehensive backup and BCDR strategy is not an option but necessary because the business world is wrought with fierce competition. A single, severe data loss incident or disruption could open the gates for your competitors to eat into your profits and customer base. 

You must do everything in your capacity to bring all the right tools and strategies together so that your business can operate seamlessly, even in the face of chaos. Are you ready to approach the concept of comprehensive backup and BCDR practically?

It isn’t as difficult as you think. All you need to do is collaborate with an expert partner like us who has the knowledge and experience to take care of your backup and BCDR needs.

Get in touch with us today to learn more. Give us a call at 855-647-3835 or [email protected]. 

Article curated and used by permission.

Sources:

1. TechRadar

 

2. IDC Report

3. GDPR Associates

4. Techjury.Net

Ways Cyber Resilience Can Protect Your SMB

Ways Cyber Resilience Can Protect Your SMB

Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) typically invest less in cybersecurity, making them easier targets for cybercriminals. Close to 30% of businesses encounter a cyberattack at least once per week due to a lack of cybersecurity plans.

The need for continual vigilance and protection against hackers has led many SMBs to complicate cybersecurity matters. Though the percentage of businesses that have adopted formal, business-wide incident response plans has increased from 18% in 2015 to 26% in 2020, the ability to contain an actual attack dropped by 13%. The inability to control a cyber attack occurs because businesses do not consistently test the threat-readiness of incident response plans. Many of them use too many security products that hinder the ability to distinguish and respond to a cyberattack promptly.

Here, a cyber resilience strategy can benefit organizations to protect uptime and recover from incidents quicker. Some people use the terms cybersecurity and cyber resilience simultaneously, but the meanings are different.

While cybersecurity primarily aims at blocking nefarious cyber players from attacking your network, cyber resilience is more about planning, defending, responding to, and recovering quickly from a cyberattack. Endpoint protection, email security, network security, backup and data recovery, identity and access management, and a host of other critical solutions together fuel a comprehensive cyber resilience strategy.

Cyber Resilience: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover

Arm Your Business with Cyber Resilience

The cyber threat landscape is evolving at lightning speed, and traditional security measures cannot keep up with it. Experts have predicted that a ransomware attack will occur every 11 seconds in 2021. The only way forward for businesses, including yours, is to compose a cyber resilience strategy that highlights ways to move forward in the face of a cyberattack.

Your business is cyber resilient when:

  • You’ve implemented measures to guard against cyberattacks
  • Proper risk control measures for data protection get deployed  
  • Hackers cannot severely disrupt business operation during or after an attack

The major components of a cyber resilience strategy are:

Threat protection: By deploying effective attack surface management and risk management, you can easily take your business through the path of cyber resilience. Doing so helps you minimize first-party, third-party, or fourth-party risks arising from data leaks, data breaches, or misconfigurations. Additionally, assessment reports identify key risk areas that require attention.

Adaptability: Cybercriminals are shapeshifters who constantly change their devious tactics. Ensure your business can conform to emerging cyber threats.

Recoverability: To quickly bounce back after a security incident, your business must have all the necessary infrastructure, including robust data backups. Conducting mock drills that let you understand the employee readiness to counter cyberattacks is also imperative.

Durability: Your IT team can improve the business’ durability through constant system enhancements and upgrades. No matter what strategy the criminals use, prevent their actions from overcoming you through shock and disruption.

5 Ways Cyber Resilience Protects SMBs

Adopting cyber resilience proves beneficial before, during, and after cyberattacks. Here are five ways cyber resilience protects SMBs:

Enhances system security, work culture, and internal processes

By implementing a cyber resilience approach within your business, you can easily design and develop strategies specifically for your existing IT infrastructure. Additionally, cyber resilience improves security within each internal process so that you can communicate desired behavior to employees.

Maintains business continuity

Cyber resilience ensures that operations are not significantly affected and business gets back to normal after a cyberattack.

Lessens financial loss

The financial damage caused by a breach can be so severe that businesses go bankrupt or even close. Cyber resilience keeps threats in check, reducing the chances of business disruption and limiting financial liabilities.

Meets regulatory and insurance requirements

Cyber resilience helps keep your business out of regulatory radars by satisfactorily following all necessary criteria. Also, complying with regulations can be advantageous to your company for cyber insurance claims.

Boosts company reputation 

Having cyber resilience by your side gives you better control in the event of a successful cyberattack. It helps you block attacks, bounce back quickly if an incident happens, and lessen the chaotic aftereffects of a breach. This improves your business reputation among partners and customers.

Don’t worry if the concept of cyber resilience is tough to crack. We can guide your business to and through cyber resilience. Start with an assessment to check your business’ cyber resilience level. Contact us now at 855-647-3835 or send us an email at [email protected]. 

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Article curated and used by permission.

Sources:

1. Infosecurity Magazine

2. The 2020 Cyber Resilient Organization Study

3. JD Supra Knowledge Center

Recommended Security Practices

Prevention is always better than remedy, especially when managing data, systems, software, and networks. By proactively utilizing best practices, it is feasible to enhance your supply chain’s security. Some of these practices include: 

• Security Awareness Training: You must train all employees about how even a minor mistake on their part could critically jeopardize security. Since employees are usually the first line of defense against cyberattacks, they must be given sufficient training to distinguish and avoid any possible threats. Planning and implementing an effective security awareness training program should not be a one-time event. It should take place at regular intervals to ensure all stakeholders are on the same page.

• Data Classification: Data classification allows you to identify data, segment it according to its worth and assign security to each data type. The bottom line is that if you do not know your data thoroughly — especially the information that rests in your supply chain — you will struggle immensely at securing it.

• Access Control: Allowing an access control gateway lets only authenticated users access your business data, including users that are part of your supply chain. With robust authentication and authorization protocols in place, you can reduce the chances of sensitive data getting compromised. While authentication verifies whether the user is whom they claim to be, authorization verifies whether a user has access to a particular type of data. Hence, both hold equal importance when implementing a robust access control strategy.

• Monitoring: Given the invasive and inevitable nature of security threats, a quick reaction time is necessary to your supply chain security effectiveness. Hence, automated and consistent monitoring is vital for rapid detection and response to an attack. You must gather and dissect relevant data to recognize suspicious activity or dubious system changes within your organization. You can pre-define acceptable behavior on the monitoring system, and if breached, the system will trigger an alert.

• Endpoint Protection: Endpoint protection ensures that end-user gadgets are protected against nefarious cybercriminals. Cybercriminals are getting more proficient at identifying the most vulnerable point within your network. In most cases, it turns out to be an end-user device on your network or even devices on your third-party partner’s network. Therefore, securing endpoints is crucial to reinforcing the security of your business and your supply chain.

• Patch Management: Security gaps left wide open due to inept patch management can leave your business vulnerable to cyberattacks. Whenever a new patch gets delivered, it is essential that you deploy it immediately. Failing to do so could give cybercriminals a clear passage to circumvent their defenses. 

• Routine Scanning: Routine vulnerability scanning is a collaborative process to test, recognize, examine and reveal potential security threats (internal and external). Automating these scans, so they are conducted accurately and regularly without investing a lot of time and effort will work wonders. 

• Network Segmentation: Once you dissect your business’ network or segment it into smaller units, you can control data movement between segments and secure each part from one another. Moreover, automating the process can help you smartly restrict suspicious entities (both internal and external) from gaining access to vital information or data.

• Managed Detection and Response: MDR is an economically feasible service that helps you with in-depth threat detection and response. Threat hunting, which is part of this service, helps you with deep research and analysis of vulnerabilities, thus allowing you to deal strategically with cyber threats.

Adopt These Best Practices Before It’s Too Late

When it comes to supply chain security, the best practices mentioned above are just the tip of the iceberg of what you should do to avoid security incidents. Enlisting the help of an MSP can help you stay ahead of the curve since they have the experience and expertise to shore up your business’ security. Ensure your business is protected. Contact us for a free network scan to ensure that your data is secure. Give us a call at 855-647-3835 or email us at [email protected]

Article curated and used by permission.

How Backup and Disaster Recovery Protects SMBs

Many small businesses operate with a sense of unrealistic optimism regarding data loss and disaster recovery. However, the actuality can be considerably different and can negatively affect your business if you’re not vigilant. As technology increases, so do the risk of data loss. Can your business afford such a costly incident?

It doesn’t matter if data loss happens because of human error, cyberattack, or natural disaster. It can have far-reaching consequences such as:

  1. Severe downtime:
    For SMBs, per-hour downtime costs vary from $10,000 to $50,000.1
  2. Damage to your company’s reputation:
    One-third of customers will end their association with a business following a severe data loss.2
  3. Regulatory penalties:
    Failure to protect data can draw penalties worth 2% to 4% or more of company turnover.
  4. Permanent closure:
    Some businesses are unable to recover financially from an incident and close permanently.

Prioritizing backup and disaster recovery for your business is significant. A robust backup and disaster recovery plan implements secure, uninterrupted backup and quick data recovery — with a cloud-based structure that assures the company runs seamlessly in the event of any disaster.

Key Terms Used in Backup and Disaster Recovery

The following terms will give you an idea about the type of actions and processes you should aim to implement within your business:

• Minimum Business Continuity Objective (MBCO)
MBCO signifies the minimum level of output needed after severe disruption to achieve business objectives.

•Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption (MTPD)
MTPD is the duration after which the impact on a business caused by minimal or zero output becomes intolerably severe.

•Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
RTO is the time it takes before employees can start working after a data-loss event. (Measured in minutes)

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
RPO is the amount of work that can be lost and will need to be done again after a data-loss event. (Measured in seconds)

Deploy Backup and Disaster Recovery Today

Having an effective backup and disaster recovery solution provides several benefits. Here are the six advantages:

  1. Shield your business against natural disasters
    The first half of 2020 alone had close to 200 reported natural disasters. While it’s impossible to stop a natural disaster, you can ensure your data is protected and take the necessary measures to prevent downtime. In Texas, predominantly South Texas, hurricane season is a big issue.
  2. Decrease the result of a cyberattack
    With the rate of cyberattacks going through the roof and small businesses being a constant target of attacks, it is necessary to have a robust backup and disaster recovery solution to protect your business.
  3. Safeguard sensitive data
    If your business handles sensitive data like Personally Identifiable Information (PII), measures must be taken to ensure it never ends up in the wrong hands. Safeguarding all crucial data can establish your business’s reputation and prevent regulatory penalties.
  4. Quick recovery
    It doesn’t matter how a disaster strikes. What matters is how quickly your business bounces back. A good backup and disaster recovery solution helps your business get up and running as soon as possible.
  5. Lessen the impact of human error
    From accidental or intentional misdelivery or deletion to data corruption, employees can pose a considerable security threat to your business. Deploying backup and disaster recovery is, therefore, imperative. You must also train your employees on the difference between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. By training your employees, data loss can be prevented and save substantial business money.
  6. Get ahead of system failure
    Sudden system failure can lead to costly downtime if you don’t implement a backup and disaster recovery plan for your business.

Remember, it’s your responsibility to protect your business from data loss and its turbulent aftereffects. If you can’t handle this alone, don’t worry. We’re here for you. With our backup and disaster recovery solutions, we can help build a resilient strategy to protect your business against data loss and give you much-needed peace of mind in the event of a disaster. Give us a call to find out how your business can benefit significantly from our backup and disaster recovery plan.

855-647-3835 or [email protected]

Article curated and used by permission.

Sources:

  1. TechRadar
  2. IDC Report
  3. GDPR Associates

Welcome to Our Blog

Welcome to our blog! Our blog will be utilized to bring you the latest and greatest news on topics we feel will benefit you and your organization best. Our main topics will be cybersecurity tips and IT service-related questions you may have. If you ever need a question answered, go ahead and submit it, and we will create a vlog or blog post on it to help you understand.

Phoenix Technology Consulting

We are excited that we get to bring in the new year as a new company. What do the kids say, new year, new us? We want all of our clients to feel apart of our Phoenix family. If you ever have any questions or just having a little issue, no question is silly. We are willing to go the extra mile to ensure your technology performs as efficiently as possible to keep you efficient.

Here is what we are looking to do in 2021 and moving forward. We are looking to get our blog up and running first and foremost. Next, we would like to start a vlog, which we can use to answer questions or discuss topics you are interested in. We are starting a podcast. Please feel free to leave comments below with your suggestions or direct message us on our social media.

I wanted to provide a welcome message along with some updates and exciting news to bring a little awareness of what we’re working on. The comment section below is always available. We are always looking at ways to keep growing and getting our name out there. Most importantly, we are an IT and cybersecurity services provider. If you are in need of IT support, managed IT services, cybersecurity services, or more, give us a call at 855-647-3835 or send an email to [email protected]. Just let us know; we are here to help.

Thanks for reading!
-Gabby

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