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]

 

 

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

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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