Industry Wrap № 4.
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: IT Reliability and Security: Avoiding Stops and Simplify your Infrastructure.
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IT Reliability and Security: Avoiding Stops
As technology decisions are made for remote work, here are 4 meaningful steps you can take to minimize privacy pitfalls.
Many businesses are shifting operations online. If mismanaged, there are potential privacy pitfalls that will prove very damaging. With new regulations coming, the stakes for getting your pivot right are higher than ever before. These 4 steps can help you minimize pitfalls.
- Be mindful of how your vendors and partners use customer data
- When processing data, perform impact assessments to monitor risk
- Strive for clarity in your privacy policies
- Designate a Data Protection Officer (DPO)
Managing rapid digital transformation can mean taking risky actions. In this current climate, depending on regulatory donations is an unnecessary risk for businesses when they can take simple, process-driven steps to support privacy.
SOURCE: HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
Even the Royal Military College is susceptible to attacks. Is it time to review your cybersecurity plan?
The website and email systems for Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont. remained offline after a reported ransomware attack. When asked if the military is concerned about the possibilities of sensitive information accessed through the cyber attack, they responded with “Unclassified military research usually ends up being published (publicly) so the unclassified stuff, even if it was affected, would be public anyway.”
David Swan, a former member intelligence officer in the Canadian Forces who is now the Alberta-based director of the Centre for Strategic Cyberspace and International Studies said the biggest damage would likely be an embarrassment, as well as loss of intellectual property through academic research. “In this day and age, especially at a military college, there should be better threat awareness and readiness”.
Here’s how to overcome the 4 key barriers to cyber hygiene success in your workplace.
IT policy, physical security, firewalls and other technical precautions are very necessary, but teaching employees what to and not to do makes a connection for a strong, secure front line defense to support all other security measures. Cybersecurity training is clear but is not always easy and has many barriers when properly teaching security measures. A lack of cybersecurity best practices can seem overwhelming, especially to a smaller organization with limited resources. These are a few solutions that can help organizations be more secure.
| PROBLEM | SOLUTIONS |
| I don’t know enough about cybersecurity | There are a variety of great online learning resources created specifically with cybersecurity training in mind. Next Dimension offers a FREE cybersecurity course with tools for your organization. |
| It costs too much | When it comes to cybersecurity training, the path to C-suite support is through ROI (Return on Investment) and Risk Management. |
| I don’t have time | The average amount of downtime caused by ransomware attacks in the second quarter of 2019 was almost 10 days. That’s 80 hours that each worker is stopped from doing their job altogether. |
| Company culture | Developing a cybersecurity culture requires a message of accountability from the top in order to drive organizational behaviour change. |
Working towards tighter cybersecurity is one of the best things a business can do to protect their employees, customers and their bottom line.
Simplify Your Infrastructure
Simplifying the approach to IT creates an opportunity for increased agility moving forward.
To preserve and encourage technology investments, CIOs have to show how tech can alleviate business concerns. While the adoption of a “digital workplace” accelerated, organizations tried to determine what areas to “cut without impacting business too bad,” Greene said. Creating financial agility early on allowed businesses to make more decisions for the second half of 2020. The pandemic has given a great push for changes CIOs have long worked to drive, including more agile tech initiatives respective to the business.
The benefit is technology is seen as a growth engine. Organizations don’t want to cripple IT as it is what keeps businesses operating when everything is shut down. The biggest push for the new generation of CIOs is going to focus on changing the portion of IT spend from non-discretionary to discretionary. The pandemic is going to challenge the stamina of executive technology leadership, and some CIOs won’t want to stick around to see the evolution through.
93% of orgs are deploying workloads across two or more clouds. Here’s 3 tips to simplify your infrastructure.
As organizations embark on their digital transformation journey, it is very important they have a strategy in place to make most of the data, security, resiliency and application advantages of multi-cloud environments. As Canadian businesses place a closer focus on multi-cloud solutions, here are some important considerations to make the most of a multi-cloud strategy.
Security. There is an inherent cybersecurity concern that comes from the lack of control and visibility into security practices in hosted cloud environments. Multi-cloud balances this concern by allowing organizations to select the right environment and level of security for each workload.
Flexibility and transparency. Multi-cloud environments provide the ability to adjust through flexibility and transparency helping both IT teams and organizations in general, find true business value
Keep it Simple. With the complexity that is layered over multiple clouds and multiple vendors, having one central hub for operations and management reduces complexity and can help lighten the load for IT staff/maintenance.
Transitioning to the cloud is one of the most important and fundamental steps in any organization’s digital transformation. The benefits are numerous, and with the future primed for the evolution and adaptation of emerging tech, multi-cloud provides an essential foundation for tomorrow’s workloads and workforce needs.
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