Blog

And, yes, this sudden award has something to do with Heller Search sending Bryley ice cream!

To thank the Bryley team for its responsiveness – Heller Search sent Bryley a Cold Stone Creamery ice cream party. It was delicious and fun… [2 min. read]

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]

Achievement Brings Elite Email Security Solution to Bryley Clients

Mimecast is considered among the IT industry’s best email protection systems. With Kristin Pryor’s recent certification in Mimecast’s deployment and her knowledge about how it can be effectively integrated with Bryley’s security stack, she can advise Bryley clients when they should include Mimecast as part of their defenses … [4 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]

Don’t Get Lost In The Vulnerabilities

The lockdowns found me in my garden more. One of the things I learned those couple years was that I started out intently focused on the annoyance of weeds – pulling them, pouring boiling water on them when they popped up in the cracks of my driveway, generally trying to kill them. But at some point my focus shifted and I began to see the whole yard – I especially noticed where different plants thrived or failed to. I moved things around. Happy, healthy plants – including working on achieving thicker ground covers (like that sedum pictured) – look beautiful while making the conditions less hospitable to weeds.

Vulnerabilities, which includes unpatched software and misconfigured systems, can be thought of like weeds … [6 min. read]

There is no doubt that over time, people are going to rely less and less on passwords

–Bill Gates, 2004

A 2023 study found that 64% of people surveyed are not confident they are managing their passwords well. Most discouraging in the new survey was the report that of those born after 1990 only 20% use unique and strong passwords. These stats bring also a feeling of futility: ‘so many data exposures – what does it matter?’ ‘there is no privacy anymore – whatever.’

I don’t share the opinion that we should throw in the towel, though who can’t sympathize with the sentiment? But Bryley sees time and again that, in fact, compromised passwords matter to an organization’s security. As an example of the severity of the problem, Google Cloud reported in October that 54% of breaches “are resulting from common and well-known threat actor attack techniques, such as obtaining and using stolen credentials …” [4 min. read]

Here are some notable events and stories from 2023:

A Guiding Principle

Bryley is a client of Bryley, President Garin Livingstone said in a 2023 interview. We have people at Bryley that need technical help. We also need to make sure that our computer systems are being maintained and updated. Among the benefits of adhering to this model?

• Updates and patching are as minimally disruptive as we can get them.
• New technologies are fully vetted before the tech is deployed

This principle of being one’s own client has been a standard that Bryley has observed over the course of its thirty-six years … [6 min. read]