Author Archive for: LStrauss

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

If you have an internal IT staff, those people may often be stuck dealing with day-to-day ‘putting out fires’ – like answering, ‘why can’t I print this?’ or ‘I erased a file.’ And then occasionally the IT staff has to deal with something really going wrong – like a hardware failure or cybercriminal disruption.

The staff also has to stay up-to-date with patching vulnerabilities and fulfilling regulations and industry compliancies, and similarly meeting the demands of a cybersecurity insurance policy.

These issues keep many internal teams from having the space to think about IT proactively. Dealing with issues limits anyone’s ability to stand back and see the whole picture.

Big-Picture Thinking

A deep external team is an ideal supplement to an IT team embedded in the business. First by adding outside support, you automatically gain perspective. The external team is situated to provide a view of your overall IT operations. This in itself can lead to more strategic decision-making. And considering IT strategically can clarify how you will achieve the business results you’re after [4 min. read]

If employees cannot access files or applications to do their work, organizations feel the pain of lost revenue and low employee morale. It may also be felt by clients, vendors and prospects who may question the organization’s fitness.

Online calculators can help you estimate the cost of downtime for your organization. Roughly an organization with twenty-five employees and an average revenue/employee of $100/hour means a $2,500 loss per hour of downtime. If your organization has 10TB of data backed up locally, the backup might take 40 hours to be restored. That means the cost of the downtime is $2,500 x 40 = $100,000.

And this is why business continuity as we talk about it in the IT world has been so highly prized … [5 min. read]

Heard of the Top Ten? The Final Four?

The Business Continuity Pyramid was built to be generally instructive about what Bryley has found to be foundational to an organization’s cybersecurity defense. The foundation of the pyramid shows these six cybersecurity recommendations:

• • Comprehensive Support Program (CSP) Basic
  • Security Updates
  • Email Protection
  • Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware
  • AI-Enabled XDR (Extended Detection and Response)
  • Assessments

These six were chosen because these items do the essential work that keeps an organization going despite the many threats every business faces.

So that begged the question, what if these six items were ignored? What might be the impact? [6 min. read]

The threat posed by overconfidence

–Jeetu Patel, Cisco

Economist Daniel Kahneman’s life’s work (he died last month at 90) was to point out how irrationally we behave, including telling the Guardian that if he had a magic wand, he’d most like to correct our overconfidence.

The Titanic’s sinking may have been due to overconfidence. Investors’ ideas on moves they should make in the stock market wind up costing them 4%. And now we have the Cisco 2024 Cybersecurity Readiness Index Report. This is a double-blind survey of over 8,000 business and cybersecurity leaders. The findings show the greatest cybersecurity weakness is a disconnect between overconfidence that their business will be able to avoid a disrupting attack and their analyzed readiness for avoiding disruption. To be exact: 73% of business leaders anticipate an attack in the next two years, but a surprising 3% were shown to be prepared for such an attack … [6 min. read]

And Now for Something Completely Different

In the light of summer in a forest, a colony of ants was busy. It was known as The Colony of Methodical Memory. And the colony worked hard. The ants built clever storerooms within the earth. And they meticulously copied their knowledge and wisdom onto many gathered leaves and placed these in the secure storerooms.

There was at the same time in the same wood a swarm of grasshoppers, known as The Swarm of ‘Hi There’. While the ant colony worked, the grasshoppers swayed on leaves in the sun … [5 min. read]