Monthly Archives: June 2024

Consider Managed Detection and Response to Keep Your Business Secure

With malware attacks escalating in number and severity, what can small and medium-sized businesses do to protect their networks without breaking the bank? Read on to learn more about using managed detection and response (MDR) to help detect and mitigate threats to your cybersecurity.

 

The Need for Managed Detection and Response

 

Leading global technology market analysts, Canalys, shared in a LinkedIn post, ransomware attacks are increasing each year. Between the first four months in 2023, and the same period in 2024, publicly disclosed attacks increased by 96%. Between 2022 and 2023, the attacks increased by 68%. These attacks are just the ones that are publicly disclosed ones. What about attacks on small to medium-sized businesses and not been reported? And what can smaller businesses do if they don’t have the time and resources to constantly be monitoring their networks? 

 

What is MDR and How Does it Work?

 

Enter Managed Detection and Response, or MDR. This option “relies on an external third-party to monitor a company’s IT systems and respond to threats in real time.” Unlike traditional cybersecurity deployments, it is fully managed and delivered by an external provider. MDR is also sometimes called “cybersecurity as a service.” Cybersecurity can be challenging for SMBs especially, as it can require time and effort on the part of the company and even then not all threats can be dealt with. But with the 24/7 monitoring provided by MDR, companies can focus on meeting business goals. 

 

Managed Detection and Response combines cybersecurity software, threat intelligence and human (or machine learning powered) intelligence to detect threats to the network, including unpatched software and operating systems, weak passwords, and susceptibility to social engineering (“phishing”) attacks, among others. Not only does MDR quickly analyze suspicious activity, assessing its severity and potential impact, but isolates and neutralizes any threat. Any intelligence gathered about threats will be accessible to machine learning to improve future detection.

 

Further Benefits of Managed Detection and Response

 

Beyond the detection and response capabilities, MDR can help in other ways. By using an external third party, you don’t need to have specialized staff on site. Therefore, you can focus on activities that bring revenue and advance business goals. What’s more, MDR services can work with your existing security solutions, enhancing their reach and effectiveness. For instance, you can combine MDR with an endpoint security solution like Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) for even stronger detection and response.

 

The cloud-based managed detection and response is a way to monitor your network and mitigate threats, preventing costly cyberattacks. For further assistance, contact your trusted technology advisor today. 

Disaster Preparedness for Business Recovery

We are entering the seasons of storms (including hurricanes and tornadoes), wildfires and other possible disasters. Even a power outage of short duration can affect your business. What if you ship orders because of an interruption in your order processing service, for example? Or what about a bigger disaster, that takes your business out of operation for days or weeks? Read on to learn more about the importance of disaster preparedness for keeping your business running.

 

What a Disaster Recovery Plan is and Why You Need One 

 

Having a plan does seem obvious, doesn’t it? Yet many companies may not have one in place. A definition of a DRP is a structured document describing how your company can resolve data loss and get back to functionality during and after a disaster. Even a brief power outage that may seem like just an inconvenience can strongly impact your business. Downtime can be costly to your bottom line and to your reputation. 

 

Advantages of Having a Plan

 

A key benefit is knowing what to do when a disaster happens, and swinging into action immediately. What’s more, a plan will give you confidence, and give others like workers and customers confidence in you. Customers will know that you’re keeping their data safe from loss or compromise, because you’ve backed up that data. You’ll know how much to budget for recovery from disaster, and which systems need to be back up and running. 

 

Getting Started: Planning and Documentation

A conversation gets the ball rolling. Discussing what might happen in the event of a disaster, and what mission-critical systems need to resume first. What will happen first, and who will be responsible for making that happen? Who are your stakeholders, and what do they need from you? What data most needs to be protected, and how will it be safeguarded? What information will you provide, and what will be the messaging? The answers to these and other questions will give you the structure for your planning and documentation. 

 

Besides answering the above questions, your documented plan should include both recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) – two key metrics for preparedness. Recovery Time Objective refers to how much time can pass to get your systems back up and running, whereas the recovery point objective refers to the age of files to retrieve from backup storage. 

Working the Plan: Testing and Refining

 

Testing, done frequently and with practical exercises, will show how well your plan works, and also show “what you don’t know that you don’t know.” Going through scenarios and table-top exercises will point up unknown vulnerabilities, show what needs updating, and show whether key players know what to do. Information technology workers in particular will know about data protection strategy, and are vital to your efforts. Having tested your plan, you will know what changes are needed. Once the changes are made, testing can resume. 

 

Disaster recovery planning may seem overwhelming. Taken step by step, though, it is possible and your business can be on a sure footing. For more assistance, contact your trusted technology advisor today.