There are two main reasons why organisations with less than 1,000 employees and/or without their own IT department are increasingly looking to 3^rd party experts to help manage their IT services:

1. They can’t stay on top of all the new cybersecurity threats – and their insurance carrier requires that they do.

2. The principals need to focus on their core competencies and on growing their business.

Cybersecurity

Unfortunately, long gone are the days when IT professionals could rely on firewalls to protect their network. Equally unfortunate, as we’ve all heard over and over – and indeed we have said repeatedly – professionals and laymen alike all know that “it’s no longer a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ you will get hacked/breached”.

Establishing a good security posture, by implementing strong protocols, training your people to avoid responding to phishing and other potentially malware-laden emails, licensing excellent cyber security software solutions, and gaining better visibility into your cloud environments , network(s) and endpoints, is a great first step.

And here comes another ‘unfortunately’… Unfortunately, that’s not enough today.

Today, truly effective security operations require reducing not only the ability for bad actors to access your network or cloud, but reducing the time it takes to detect and remediate the things that get through.

This requires having advanced detection technologies in place to identify potential threat vectors. On average, most organisations receive hundreds to thousands of event alerts each day, but… they simply don’t have the resources (manpower or budget) to investigate and remediate all the alarms that get triggered by the escalating cybercrime onslaught.

Multiple reports published by IT leaders such as Cisco, IBM, Ingram Micro, McAfee and others since January 2022, suggest that because over 60% of North American firms can no longer respond to all alarms, front-line IT staff are ignoring certain alarms, or changing settings to reduce the alarms they receive.

Obviously, this practice puts networks, operations/businesses, proprietary data, personal info records and reputations at risk. If CEOs and CFOs knew the extent of this practice, few of them would sleep well.

At the same time, to truly protect your organisation, you need to be capturing and assessing User Behaviour Analytics and analysing Detection and Response histories, and looking at packet capture (PCAP) from cloud to endpoint. To get it right requires continuous monitoring and assessment by cyber security specialists – ones who are up to date in the most recent threat vectors and remediation approaches –  so that you can fine-tune and improve your processes.

If you’re not in the cyber security business, then you may want to consider having an expert third-party manage this for you.

For more information, please see our next blog post, or contact us at [email protected] or (416) 429-0796 or 1.877.238.9944 (Toll Free).