It’s been quite a year! Organizations need their IT leaders to step it up faster than ever despite restrictions from quarantine mandates and economic uncertainty. Security is center stage and digital transformation became a necessity. The biggest obstacle? Talent – how to find, recruit, invest, and retain the most valuable asset in modernizing IT.
Many companies are migrating to the cloud, but they have to navigate various complexities and avoid a few “gotchas” along the way. The “work from anywhere” trend accelerated by the pandemic last year has become the new norm for many businesses, and it’s leading to an explosion of cloud adoption. Analysts estimate that 90% of enterprise customers are looking to the cloud for calling and other unified communications (UC) infrastructure. There are undeniable benefits of migrating calling and collaboration to the cloud, but you’re missing out if you’re not integrating these solutions and other business apps. Consider the following example: A collaboration team works in the same document via a file-sharing application, and they want to update other contributors. The app sends notices via email and connects with calling, messaging and meeting apps from three vendors. Each contributor is forced into an endless cycle of context switching between three or more applications while actively collaborating on the project. Sadly, this is the norm for many companies.
In any industry the availability to scale to meet demand is paramount. Having a technology infrastructure in place to do so could be the difference between success and failure. Cloud services are designed to fulfill this exact need. However, organizations that make this realization and shift their resources face many questions: what type of cloud best matches our needs? How do we know which services we need? Should we choose on-premises, public, or a hybrid cloud? Finding answers – or even knowing if you’re asking the right questions – can seem daunting.
For more than 20 years, Presidio has been an influential force in solving challenging problems with simplified solutions across the Enterprise and beyond. Presidio’s focus is on transforming where and how our clients work, modernizing their infrastructure to prepare them for future scale. We help ensure that they have adopted the right cloud strategy, securing everything from the edge devices that sit on the perimeter, across multiple connectivity methods and large data lakes, and through the cloud.
Looking at the “new office,” Presidio is helping customers enhance their current capabilities to bring the office where their employees are. Every aspect of collaboration has a human touch to it, and we help customers become future-ready. It’s about connecting people, and companies can’t afford to make a mistake with their most valuable resource—their employees.
Despite efforts within the cyber security industry to oversimplify the concept, Zero Trust should be thought of as a strategy and framework, as opposed to a problem addressable simply by implementing technology. Technology plays an important role in providing technical security controls such as strong authentication, least privilege, and impeded lateral movement, etc. which contributes to achieving a Zero Trust model. The combination of a strategically curated eco-system of technical controls and processes requires executive buy-in and organizational support to succeed.
Everyone agrees that the best way to combat rising cybersecurity attacks is by implementing better security, but users will circumvent the defenses if it’s too cumbersome.
It’s a well-known fact that passwords are the Achilles’ heel of security. According to the 2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report, more than 80% of data breaches result from an attacker logging into a customer’s applications using stolen passwords—often initiated by an email phishing attack.
Dubbed “one of the most disruptive digital ransom schemes reported” by Reuters, the ransomware attack on Friday shut down an entire pipeline network, which is the source of nearly half of the U.S. East Coast’s fuel supply. As of Tuesday, the FBI and US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have put out a joint advisory about the attack. The culprit has been identified as DarkSide, a malware operator that runs Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS). You can read the full alert here.
As a fast, easy alternative for compute and storage resources, the public cloud practically sells itself: it requires no large up-front capital expenditures, its pay-per-usage model delivers the speed and agility to get to market fast, and it’s ideal for hosting short-term or trial content. What’s more, leading cloud environments are optimized for reliable performance on Intel® technology for the data center.
Whether we like it or not, the way we work and where we work has fundamentally influenced our collective perspective. The pandemic forced organizations to quickly update and implement business resiliency plans or scramble to develop and execute plans to support remote work and education potentially mortgaging data security in the process. The pandemic continues to force organizations to revisit long-standing beliefs and attitudes about and toward remote work and education. As a result, while most knowledge or service-based organizations learned that they are more productive than ever, they are also very vulnerable because traditional approaches to securing remote devices and access to sensitive data simply did not travel well. The cybersecurity industry responded quickly and, in many cases, was well-positioned to support a transition to remote work. The industry foresaw an increased need to secure and manage remote devices as well as access to sensitive data from those devices, but the pandemic expedited and magnified the use case.
