Part Four Of a Five-Part Series We’ve been talking about the benefits of working with a partner versus a vendor for the past few months. Since then, we’ve discussed how a partner aligns their goals to your business’s needs, understands your industry, and invests time and trust in a way only a partner can. Here’s one other way a partner relationship beats working with a vendor, they’ll make sure you’re making the right investment. For instance, a few years ago I was working with a customer who wanted to add next-generation firewall services to their network. After investing months in the project, developing the design, documentation, and negotiating the best price from the manufacturer, the order was placed and engineers were due onsite within days. Everyone was excited; it was going to be a major improvement to their network. At the last-minute, word came down from the manufacturer, unofficially thru back-channels, that the product we had ordered was going to be discontinued in the next six months. What were we to do? What would a regular ole’ vendor do? I can tell you what a partner would do. They would put their customer’s needs first. So that’s what we did. We notified our customer, canceled the order, had our engineers stand down, and began to find the right solution once again. The replacement product had already been released, so once we verified it was stable, we redesigned the project from scratch, rewrote the documentation, and renegotiated with the manufacturer. Within a few weeks engineers were onsite and it went off without a hitch. From that experience, several benefits came to light.
Today, the risk of a security incident or data breach is higher than ever. Having an Incident Response Plan is crucial to maintaining a strong security posture so you can protect your business before, during and after an attack.
Digitization. It’s a great buzzword. Over the past year it’s reached an all-time high in usage. Every hardware and software manufacturer has written article upon article about it. Many have dedicated entire marketing programs to it. Whoever coined the term should be given a marketing award because it’s a shiny new skin on something that has been around for a very long time. Something we've even encountered seventeen years ago.
(Image via Reddit) It’s the holiday season and that means more people are traveling and spending time in airports, bus/train stations, and generally wondering if the next stop, coffee shop or store has free Wi-Fi. The habitual curiosity is understandable – why use your cell data when you can hook up to a free connection to the web, right? In fact, there’s always a couple of questions I seem to get on this subject when people find out I’m a security professional. They are: What do you think about public Wi-Fi? Is free Wi-Fi safe to use? Is it ok to use the Wi-Fi at the airport?
Ransomware has evolved. It now spreads on its own inside a network, from machine to machine, encrypting files and compromising hosts. With an estimated global cost of cyberattacks sitting at $400 billion per year, and ransomware being expected to remain at the forefront of these attacks, it’s important to know how ransomware works, who it targets, and how to protect your business with a multi-layered defense. Take a look inside ransomware with our partners at Cisco Security:
