What Are You Worth (To A Hacker)?

We hear about major breaches taking place seemingly every day and in reality, new breaches are happening every minute—but what is it all worth? What are you worth to a hacker, and is it worth their effort? The answer to the latter question is an undeniable “Yes.” Monetarily, to an attacker, you (and your data) are worth every second and penny it takes to generate a successful intrusion.

With all the talk about ransomware and cybersecurity breaches, many have wondered – what data protection strategy should I be deploying? How can I ensure that I have another copy of my data that is isolated (and by isolated, I mean that if ransomware does crypto-lock my data, I can go to my “safe deposit box” and restore my data center)? Ironically, we have been preaching to our customers over the last few years that tape is dead and should be replaced with disk-based backup storage or cloud repositories for long-term retention. Now I have to face those same customers and tell them that the best way to airgap their data is to archive their backups to tape. Yes, it sounds old school, but it is the best way to remain protected from all the modern threats to your data.

A northeastern city had developed an initiative to provide free, public WiFi in a downtown, outdoor area. The city had invested a great deal of money into revitalizing the area, and improving the wireless infrastructure was part of the mayor’s vision for creating a 21st century, connected city that would attract tech-savvy young professionals and leading conferences to the area. Municipal wireless would also add value for residents of the city, particularly lower-income residents who lacked access to internet in their homes.

As we approach the end of 2019, it’s important to think back to the accomplishments and lessons learned this year. I am fortunate to lead a team of highly talented Data Center Solutions Architects, and we’ve had a very busy year. One of the new things we’re offering in 2019 is a Data Center Resiliency Workshop, which is a two-hour workshop we conduct with customers. We ask over 160 questions and evaluate eight technologies:

While voice authentication is now a hot topic, it is not a brand-new concept. Traditionally, voice authentication was used purely as a way to replace a user’s password. It was a very manual process to establish your voice password (today, we’d call that “active enrollment”), and you were limited to very specific ways of using it (typically a challenge-response model).

At ConvergeOne, every collaboration engagement follows the WAVES Methodology. The first step is a Workshop that helps our customers take an “outside-in” view of their environment. In other words, the Workshop allows our customers to first view the expectations from the end user’s point of view (the “outside”) and subsequently consider the technology’s capabilities (the “in”) being provided to meet the end user’s expectations. This outside-in approach works equally well for all user-facing services like customer experience (CX) and unified communications (UC).

In a previous blog post, we shared how organizations must move toward a customer-centric approach, with a focus on the customer journey as a strategic capability. How, specifically, can you do that? Here are five steps to follow to ensure you find and keep the right customers.

This stat always hooks me: 91% of cyberattacks begin with spear phishing emails.

Recently, I read an article that an organization gets hit by ransomware every 14 seconds. In 2021, it is expected that it will be every 11 seconds. That is a very sobering statistic. Consequently, there is not one day in the life of an IT person that the subject of ransomware goes unmentioned or undiscussed. Today alone, I had two meetings with customers who wanted to talk about Cyber Recovery. In both meetings, I could hear the worried tone in the customers’ voices as they asked questions about Cyber Recovery solutions.

Digital transformation is a requirement for businesses that wish to remain competitive, and the constant state of innovation is fundamentally transforming today’s enterprise network and data center infrastructures at a rapid pace. Consequently, IT today is very different from what it used to be a few years ago. IT must balance the following considerations on a daily basis: