As you may know, many organizations last year learned the hard way that cyberdefense needs to be a core part of their mission. In March, the cybercrime gang known as Hafnium made global news when it attacked tens of thousands of organizations around the world through vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Exchange software. That gave the cybercriminals access to confidential information including usernames and passwords, intellectual property, and material that could be used for blackmail. It took an unprecedented move by the FBI to prevent the Hafnium attack from being catastrophic.
The dispersed workplace creates new kinds of cyber threats, and many organizations face urgent cybersecurity challenges. The rise in remote and hybrid work environments brought about by the pandemic was estimated by Gartner to include 51 % of global workers at the end of this past year. And the prevalence of Work From Home (WFH) will almost certainly continue.
Security incidents can vary widely in their scope and severity of damage. However, regardless of how serious an incident may appear, it will always have financial implications.
Data backup and recovery are blind spots for many CEOs and business leaders. A recent survey of IT decision-makers reported that only 8% of their CEOs track metrics to ensure a complete recovery plan. The same study found that 58% of CEOs just wanted to know that a data recovery plan was in place, ignoring the details. With the average cost of a data breach pegged at $4.24 million, that could be an expensive mistake.
Cybersecurity is already top of mind for every IT pro. And for good reasons. The Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) recently released its U.S. data breach findings for the third quarter. The good news is that publicly-reported data breaches decreased 9 percent in Q3 2021 compared to Q2 2021. The bad news is the total number of data breaches through the end of September 2021 already exceeds the total number of events for all of 2020 by 17 percent.
Communications with customers, clients, colleagues, and vendors is the lifeblood of most organizations. When there is an outage in your communication system, acute problems may occur. Today, many IT professionals and business leaders are finding that the best way to build reliability and flexibility into their phone systems is to bundle key business collaboration tools into one unified communications platform.
