Many small to medium-sized business owners think cybercriminals won’t target them because they’re too busy with large corporations. The reality is that cybercriminals are increasingly targeting smaller companies.
If you want to keep your company safe, you’ll need to have cyber experts on your side. You might consider working with a managed IT company to keep your business as secure as possible.
These companies are more than just a maintenance service. They can also help you with your cybersecurity concerns. This article lists how a managed IT services company can help with security.
Security Updates
One of the most significant security improvements you can make to your IT infrastructure is consistently updating your software. Cybercriminals uncover all kinds of glitches and oversights they can exploit in software.
The good news is that software vendors find these problems and release a security patch.
The trouble is that many users don’t install the software updates often enough. This means many companies have gaping security flaws that could be fixed with a simple download.
Of course, keeping all your software updated across your entire company can be challenging. Working with a proactive support service such as a managed IT company is a great way to ensure your software is updated consistently.
When you close the door to this typical attack vector, you can significantly increase your company’s cybersecurity. In doing so, you’ll make your organization much less attractive to cybercriminals.
Identify Weaknesses
Another way managed IT services can help you is by identifying any weaknesses in your IT infrastructure.
Cybercriminals love to exploit any weaknesses in organizations and always look for any oversights or flaws they can exploit.
For example, you may not have robust antivirus software on your company workstations, and cyber criminals could exploit this weakness by sending malware to your employees. Or, if you don’t have a backup system, criminals might target you with ransomware.
The thing with these kinds of weaknesses is that they’re not easy to see if you’re not technically minded. Managed IT services can help you find these problems and close security gaps.
Proactive Monitoring
While managed IT services can help you uncover weaknesses in your network and workstations, they won’t be able to find everything. New security flaws and cybercrime techniques are continually developed, so you must proactively monitor your IT systems to ensure security.
A well-managed IT services company can monitor your company network in real time. This means they’ll likely catch cybercrime and other suspicious activities quite promptly.
The managed IT services company can alert an incident response team in a breach. This team can then immediately take steps to mitigate the attack’s impact.
Having active monitoring and fast response time is crucial if you want to stop cyber attacks. Cyber attacks differ from conventional types of crime in that the impact is near instantaneous. This means you’ll need to respond quickly to mitigate the threat.
Employee Training and Awareness
It’s also important to consider employee training and awareness.
Human error causes most cyber breaches, so a well-managed IT services company is committed to educating your workforce. It simply isn’t enough to have robust firewalls and backup systems. You also need to have staff who know how to identify security threats.
So, how can you train your employees to identify potential security problems? Too many companies have a single awareness session and call it a day. Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy.
Cybersecurity is an ever-changing field. Therefore, learning about it is a constant process. You’ll need frequent awareness sessions to ensure your staff can identify threats to your company.
A managed IT services company can stay on top of these threats on your behalf. They can help you to communicate these risks with your workers.
Data Backup and Disaster Recovery
In the modern business world, data is the lifeblood of your organization. Without access to your data, there’s a good chance your company couldn’t function. Despite the apparent importance of data, too many companies don’t have a robust data backup system.
Data backups have become particularly important in recent years because of the ever-growing ransomware threat. Ransomware is a kind of malware that applies unbreakable encryption to the files on an infected system.
One of the only ways to get your files back is to pay a ransom to the ransomware attacker. The attacker may then give you a decryption key to reaccess your files.
There’s a solution if you want to avoid falling victim to this kind of extortion. All you need to do is have a robust data backup system. This protects your company from ransomware because you can revert to a previous configuration in the event of an attack.
The hard part is implementing a seamless backup system. You need to strike a delicate balance between a backup plan that’s too intrusive and an ineffective one.
The best backup systems work so well that users don’t even know they’re there. With this system, your company files are always backed up throughout the day. With a system like this, you’ll only lose a few hours of work at most after a ransomware attack.
A well-managed IT services company has extensive knowledge of backup systems. They’ll be able to implement the perfect system to suit your needs and budget.
Get the Security You Need
You must have the right cyber expertise to keep your company safe from cyber threats.
Since cybersecurity is constantly changing and evolving, it makes sense to work with a professionally managed IT services company. Contact us today for help.