Industry Wrap № 6.
And that’s a wrap! Next Dimension curates the most practical and useful tools and strategic IT insights from the web.
This week we shared articles across our social media covering the following topics: Simplify Your Infrastructure and IT Security: Avoiding Stops.
Looking for details? Continue reading to see more.
IT Security: Avoiding Stops
Ransomware attacks exploit unaddressed known vulnerabilities. It may be time to simplify your IT management models?
Organizations and their employees can fall victim to a variety of cyberattacks methods, including phishing campaigns, viruses, spyware and trojans. The most problematic and pervasive type is ransomware. Among different sectors, government agencies were the hardest hit by ransomware in the first quarter, accounting for 21% of all such attacks. Other industries heavily targeted by ransomware were science and education, healthcare, and industrial companies.
To protect your organization and employees against ransomware and other forms of malware, web application firewalls (WAFs) can block potential attacks against web applications on the network perimeter, including attacks against remote access systems, such as Citrix Gateway
Here are some general recommendations for personal and corporate cybersecurity.
Simplify Your Infrastructure
Staffing issues remain by far the #1 barrier to Digital Transformation initiatives. Here are 3 ways to overcome these challenges
With business environments always modernizing it can cost a lot of time and effort with little return for IT. Organizations that modernize data protection are 30% more efficient, and have 82% less production time lost when dealing with backup and recovery. Why spend all this money on something that just backs up and restores data? Any modern data protection solution must be able to release data trapped in legacy solutions, make it flexible and fluid across clouds without barriers, and be able to re-use this data to drive innovation.
Risk is a driving factor in any decision any data loss or treat can mean massive issues in brand, cost and security. Modern data protection systems need to protect data automatically, no matter where or what the data is and you are subject to so many new compliance and governance requirements.
Here are 3 ways to overcome these challenges, plus protect and manage
1. Backup Modernization – advance from legacy systems
2. Hybrid and Mutli- cloud acceleration – reduce barriers for rapid cloud adoption
3. Data security and compliance – Mitigate Risk and Security Threats
Remote workers expand the attack surface area of your systems for the bad guys, here are suggestions on what to do about it.
Employees now have to manage the technology infrastructure of their home networks, including network security and patch deployment. Endpoint security concerns have plagued IT and the coronavirus only highlighted the lack of end-to-end visibility. If an employee is working from a personal device, IT has no visibility into patching needs. The only way for you to grow your visibility is through policy. Make sure only authorized computers can get on the corporate network.
Companies that have never operated remotely to full capacity might have less control for the first time, particularly for those in highly regulated industries. As a result, cyber threats are expected to leak through the cracks. Organizations have two response options:
- Businesses fail to catch a threat when it comes about or they’re quickly trying to figure out how to do some of the automated patching, including Microsoft SCCM Patch Management.
- Businesses hire a third party, such as a managed service provider, to manage updates for them if the attack surface is large enough.
While IT and their non-technical counterparts adjust to remote support, recommendations are a little bit of patience and understanding, because IT misses the ticket system too. Patching policies have not changed too much during the pandemic, but they have become more distributed.
Twitter’s sacred VIP accounts were compromised. We are all susceptible. Do you have a response plan?
The accounts of some of the most prominent users including Joe Biden, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates posted fraudulent tweets intended to lure people into Bitcoin related scams. The growing consensus is that Twitter—the company, rather than individual users impacted—succumbed to a major hack. While the technical details of the latest breach remain unclear, the leading theory is that hackers gained access to an administrative “panel” used by Twitter employees to manage people’s accounts. It’s unclear who’s behind the hacking. The perpetrators may have at least been partly motivated by money, given their public posts requesting that Twitter users send them cryptocurrency.
A distributed workforce needs secure access to remain productive
The past few months have caused a huge transformation in our workplace, it is clear that everybody will need the technologies that can keep them safe and working continuously from wherever they are. That is in part why the demand for Secure Access Service edge (SASE) is currently so high. Companies like Cisco are delivering on SASE because it brings together the best of cloud-managed SD-WAN and cloud-delivered security into one solution, helping distributed workforces stay connected and secure.
Cisco SD-WAN Soars towards SASE, that the new release of Cisco SD-WAN provides the following main benefits:
- Simple connectivity from SD-WAN to Umbrella Secure Internet Gateway: Employees gain complete security while on the enterprise network due to integration of Umbrella cloud security with Cisco SD-WAN.
- Simple and flexible licensing models: Straightforward packages lets customers license and manage everything they need, together
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