IT Nation Week
‘Tis the season for gathering with friends and family and this year feels especially special because of the limited human interaction we’ve had over the past year. Or is it years now? It feels like years. While Thanksgiving is just around the corner, the type of gathering we are referring to is IT Nation in Orlando this month.
If you are not familiar with this event, it is the annual ConnectWise convention held in Orlando Florida where IT professionals get together to taut their wares, discuss new technologies, and have a great time being social. We’ll get to that social part in a minute, but first, let’s cover the basics.
Make Cybersecurity Awareness Part of Every Day
It Starts at Home
With October being designated National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (CSAM) by the National Cyber Security Alliance and the United States Department of Homeland Security, we are seeing promotional material from a variety of public-facing businesses. Everyone from our banks to our credit cards to the grocery store is promoting it on their various platforms. Which is great…but shouldn’t every day be a day that we’re aware of cybersecurity? This should be true especially if you’re in any way associated with the technology sector.
Cy-BURN-out
New normal. Our new reality. The various ways that we describe everyday life in the time of a global pandemic. It means a lot of change, in a lot of ways, for a lot of people. While parenting is definitely more challenging when it comes to managing to homeschool and work from home at the same time, there is another group that might not be getting as much press when it comes to feeling overwhelmed. The IT industry.
Home Office Security – Never Too Late to Evaluate
We are past the point of whether or not working remotely, or from home, is something we are unsure of. It is likely our permanent setup, or at the very least, a long term one that we need to move forward with and in confidence. These recommendations should be for readers who find themselves in this situation as well as any IT provider that oversees clients and their cybersecurity.
It Was to Be Expected
We knew that any type of newsworthy topic was going to give cybercriminals so much opportunity – and COVID-19 gave them so much bang for the buck. Just because this was something affecting the world in a detrimental way would never be reason enough for hackers to take a break. They were going to take full advantage of the situation regardless of how much worse it could make things for people during their time of need or vulnerability.
Community Effort
The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) division announced a final directive this week that requires all individual federal civilian executive branch (FCEB) agencies to “develop and publish a vulnerability disclosure policy (VDP) for their internet-accessible systems and services and maintain processes to support their VDP.”
Don’t Forget Me
It is easy to get left behind if you become less interesting. No, we aren’t talking about your friends or your childhood toys, although that does happen. We’re talking about YOU. Yes, don’t leave yourself behind. What? How? Explain!
Remember your MySpace account? Or when your significant other wanted you to create a TikTok account so that you could make fun videos – which happened once, and you realized you would never do THAT again.
Before & After
Imagine if you had two emails that were worth a million dollars each. You would do everything that you can to protect those emails and ensure that no one deleted them. You would back them up, have multiple copies in place so that if you lost those emails, you would have a quick way to recover them. You would make sure that access was limited, with strong password protection, and everyone who had access to the delete button was properly trained on how to open and read the emails safely.
Changing Landscape
We all knew that the world was going to be forever changed when the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic earlier in 2020. Just how much it was going to change was unseen – and remains unclear as each day brings new challenges for each city, state, and household in our country.
As a business owner, you too have to adapt to these changes as quickly as they come up, and yes, it seems that they are arriving daily.
Adjusting Your Business Model
New Frontier
The recent conversation with Chris Wiser and Art Gross covered several issues that will continue to be “hot topics” regardless of where we stand regarding COVID-19.
Procedure & Policy
Whether you are going to continue to work remotely or have your team return to an office, the first thing that you’ll want to do is make sure that you do everything that you can to protect your employees and your clients.