SpartanTec, Inc. Fayetteville: manageditservices

If you don’t adapt to the changing IT landscape, your company could be at risk. Smart executives partner with managed IT services providers to manage their hardware and software requirements, so they can focus on the company’s growth.

You might also consider managed IT. A managed IT provider can handle most services, including data protection, cloud computing, enterprise software development, network security and enterprise software development. We make it easy for you to find the right provider for you. Here are some questions to ask about managed information.

6 QUESTIONS YOU SHOULD ASK IF YOU ARE MANAGED IT SERVICES

What are your areas of expertise in the company?

It is important to understand how the provider fits in with your company’s size and goals. Your managed IT provider should have experience working with clients from your industry and work with businesses similar to yours. It is important to have confidence in your managed IT provider’s ability to meet compliance requirements, especially if you work in highly regulated industries.

Is your company a supplier?

Managed IT services offer the opportunity to tap into the expertise of the provider. Managed IT services can serve as a strategic partner and help you plan for the maintenance and upgrading of hardware and software. When they have many clients to support, outsourcing IT staff may not be as committed to your company. Your needs should be the focus of your provider’s IT staff.

What is your response time?

Downtime in the network can reduce productivity and, over time, cut into profits. You should consider a managed IT provider if your company cannot afford downtime. Ask about their support process, including the staff and systems used to log and resolve problems.

What is preventive maintenance?

You can be confident that your potential provider will take proactive steps to replace and upgrade IT assets if you believe in the “an ounce is worth a pound cure” philosophy. You can expect the right provider to look 12-24 months ahead and offer their recommendations and advice on what you will need so that you can plan and budget accordingly.

Who will have access?

In 2018, Facebook revealed that up to 87million of its users had had their data harvested. Managed IT support providers may collect behavioral data to help improve their services. This might not be something you are comfortable with. In the worst case, they might be selling it. Managed IT providers should be able clearly to articulate their data-handling policies.

What are your data protection methods?

Look out for words such as firewalls, encryption and advanced firewalls. Before you start looking for a provider, it is important to understand the meanings of these terms and what protections they offer. Learn about the provider’s backup practices and how they approach disaster recovery. Run if they claim they use floppy discs!

These six questions will provide a framework for your discussion. These questions will also give you information about the managed IT provider as well as their ability to meet your requirements. It’s a good idea to speak with multiple potential providers.

Call SpartanTec, Inc. now if you’re thinking getting managed IT services for your business.

SpartanTec, Inc.
Fayetteville, NC 28304
(910) 745-7776
http://manageditservicesfayetteville.com

Managed IT services is crucial for all businesses, whether big or small. The Internet is the backbone of the new digital economy. McKinsey estimates that data growth has generated 10% net new growth in GDP, and with the increase of IoT, it is estimated that in just three years there will be 4.3 devices connected to the Internet for every man, woman, and child on the planet. And that number is expected to grow into the hundreds. This has significant ramifications for how businesses operate.

Data is currency – New technology is making it possible to correlate, analyze and draw conclusions from data in ways never seen before. Organizations MUST monetize data or be left behind.
Data lives everywhere – Networks and computing have moved beyond the data center and remote office to include mobile workers, IoT wearables, smart vehicles, and the advent of the personal area networks (PAN).
Data is being auto-generated – The expansion of parallel, interconnected networks that collect and share data to allow devices to make autonomous decisions is expected to generate a massive volume of machine-to-machine data.
Most importantly, Data has value – Data is responsible for generating billions in new revenue for today’s digital organizations. Unfortunately, many organizations have a difficult time quantifying the value of their data or assigning a risk profile to it.

Call Now

Managing Risk

The problem with our increasing reliance on data is that anything that can be generated, transmitted, stored, or analyzed can also be stolen. The question that many businesses are grappling with is, “how can we capitalize on the opportunity of the digital economy while managing the attendant risk?”

This is the role of risk management.

The challenge is that traditional risk management strategies do not always translate well to our new distributed and elastic networking ecosystems or the increasing sophistication of cybercrime. Increasing hyperconnectivity of devices and networks, the globalization of the digital economy, advances in cybercrime techniques, and the commercialization of crime-as-a-service has resulted in an explosion in both the frequency and severity of cybersecurity attacks.

Given the radical transformation of network infrastructures, every organization, regardless of size or industry, needs to regularly examine their exposure to cyber risks and prepare for a potential incident. The basic formula is Risk = Threat x Vulnerability x Consequence. While this may seem simple on the surface, getting the information required to make a risk calculation is not trivial.

Historically, organizations have focused primarily on reducing and managing the threat and vulnerability components of the equation. Of course, we need to understand what devices are on our network, where our data lives, who has access to these resources, and how applications and services connect these things together.

However, managing these elements of the equation is becoming increasingly complicated, and given the current rate of effective security breaches, it can be argued that it hasn’t been particularly effective. Part of the problem is that the isolated security tools and platforms currently deployed in our networks to address threat and vulnerability were never designed to protect today’s complex ecosystems. As we move infrastructure and services to the cloud, implement and adopt IoT technologies, embrace a more mobile workforce, and acknowledge the growth of shadow IT (where data and services live outside the network, and often out of the sight or control of the IT organization), the potential attack surface grows.

In order to be effective, risk management needs to focus more resources on the third element of the equation, which is consequence. To do that, defenders must invest time and energy getting to know what data is worth protecting, who and what can access it, and how to build an ecosystem designed to prioritize and protect your digital assets and resources.

Doing this requires creating digital trust and hiring managed IT services Fayetteville NC.

Digital Trust

Effective cybersecurity is more than just defense. It is an essential enabler of digital transformation. If organizations and users can’t trust their data, and trust that it is safe, they will not engage or take the risks that drive growth, and the digital economy will fail.

To establish digital trust, every member of the ecosystem must commit to doing their part to secure mutually valuable assets. Because interconnected networks span a variety of ecosystems, from cloud and IoT to virtualized networks and endpoint devices, protecting what’s left of our borders is no longer enough. To weave digital trust into the environment, organizations require an integrated security architecture that can provide transparency and control from top to bottom, across the entire distributed technology landscape.

But digital trust is about much more than technology. It requires shifting our paradigms from being reactive to proactive. This includes educating people, establishing a culture in which security is paramount, understanding the risks associated with business objectives, and mindfully creating processes that engineer as much risk out of the system as possible.

The goal of any risk management strategy is to maximize the opportunity while minimizing risk. This requires understanding your business goals, the context of your market, customers, value proposition, and your expected results (KPI’s) and connecting them to a cybersecurity strategy. Risk can only be quantified by knowing what your vulnerabilities are as well as the impact to your organization if they are exploited.

Managed IT Services: Digital Trust Starts at the Top

The person primarily tasked with the protection of data assets in many organizations is the CISO. Today’s CISO must be more than a technologist and risk manager. They must also be business leaders, They must understand short and long-term business objectives, have clear line-of-sight across the organization and technology, and be able to establish policy and governance for everyone who touches your data. At every step along the way, it should be possible for the CISO to assess vulnerabilities and threats, size the consequences of compromises, and tie investments and focus to business objectives.

It can’t stop there, however. While the CISO is the quarterback, cybersecurity as a core behavior needs to permeate every function and all levels of the organization, from the CEO and CFO on down. Each business or functional leader must be mandated to embed security into the core processes and initiatives that they respectively own. And every employee needs to understand that good security practice benefits everyone. There can be no single throat to choke – all leaders must have a role in assigning risk and assuming the weight of consequences.

To do this effectively, organizations need to be more precise about describing why something is risky. Is this risk due to a system or process vulnerability, an internal or external threat, or the consequence of something else? Organizations also need to assess the size of a risk - low, medium, or high – to appropriately allocate resources, and estimate the consequences should a breach be successful.

Finally, you have to prepare for the unknown. Many organizations that have dealt with a breach can tell you that some risks you aren’t even aware of can have severe consequences. Which means you need to be thoughtful about engineering as much risk out of your infrastructure and processes as possible to protect your most critical assets, rather than simply relying on reactive security technology.