Cyber Security – something we hear about frequently. There is an increasing importance and focus on it within organisations as the threat landscape evolves. Constantly hearing about it probably becomes overwhelming, and perhaps confusing. Information overload means you may even put off addressing Cyber Security, something you should definitely not be doing, in order to protect your organisation.
All organisations must consider Cyber Security risks; SMEs often face a range of threats that can have serious consequences for their operations. One of the most common threats is phishing, where attackers trick employees into giving away sensitive information such as passwords. Did you know that around 90% of data breaches are caused by phishing attacks?
Another significant threat is ransomware, where malicious software will restrict access to an organisation’s data until a ransom is paid. Statistics show that SMEs are particularly vulnerable and are the prime target for cyber attacks. Additionally, a lack of identity protection and poor security practices in SMEs makes it easier for a threat actor to gain unauthorised access to infrastructure.
Nowadays cyber attackers often run their operations like a business, with many departments and people working within each. They may have their first, second and third line analysts that progress successfully comprised infrastructures further up the chain. They will spend days, weeks or even months in your environment quietly undertaking reconnaissance about your people, communication, data, financials, third parties etc.
This helps them build a picture of how you operate, who your important people are and how you back up and protect your systems and data. All of this intelligence is then used to progress their attack for financial gain, whether that’s stealing data for ransom or changing key financial information within your accounting systems. During this time, organisations are oblivious to this activity until the threat actor believes they have everything they can get. This is when your systems are encrypted and your backups destroyed.
These attacks are becoming increasingly common and are often difficult to detect. Identifying these types of threats requires layers of security. For example, instead of just relying on anti-virus, you have layered on multiple layers of protection to help reduce the likelihood of attack. These layers could be as simple as configuration changes, or enabling security tools within licensing you already pay for.
The Role of Managed Service Providers (MSPs)
MSPs will support you in implementing and levelling up security for your environment. They’ll have a menu of solutions to choose from. Some MSPs will be great at helping you understand the benefits of these solutions, tailoring them to your requirements. Others may just sell you anything and everything, without supporting you in fully understanding exactly what you’re getting and why.
We take a different approach, helping our clients understand the threats they face and build a security roadmap with the aim of improving and evolving their overall security posture. We are your trusted partner ensuring that you adopt good layers of security, aligned to key industry baselines and frameworks.
It’s critical we deploy the appropriate levels of security for you, using a combination of new services and existing services, as well as configurations you already have access to.
Next-generation Security Solutions
Our next-generation security solutions encompass key technologies which provide the layers of protection that all organisations should introduce into their IT environment. These protect against the common threats we see and provide the following key elements:
- Managing and updating your endpoint operating system security patches
- Endpoint Detection and Response to identify, stop and remediate modern threats
- Identifying any lost or leaked credentials from your organisation's email accounts
- Ensuring Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is configured on your cloud user accounts
- Integrating Email Impersonation Protection within your Microsoft 365 environment
- Providing email, data, and chat backup for your Microsoft 365 services
- A 24/7 Security Operations Centre (SOC) which will threat hunt within security logs from your endpoints and Microsoft 365 environment
- Upon any identified threats requiring attention, a 24/7 incident response process will provide the framework for our remediation, which also includes four days of security consultant time
With SMEs now adopting predominantly cloud services and many having employees who work remotely, it’s more important than ever to ensure that security is aligned with the threats we face.
We believe that all organisations should adopt the layers of protection that we have built, alongside an evolving security roadmap, ensuring the evolution of your security posture and therefore reducing the likelihood of attacks.
