21 Cybersecurity Tips for 2021 (Part 2)

In the previous installment of this blog series, we shared seven cybersecurity tips to prepare your organization for 2021. This blog post includes seven more tips to help protect your organization from cyber-attacks.

End-User Computing (EUC) refers to computer systems, platforms, and applications that are delivered via network connectivity (or internet) to an end user. EUC has been around for many years, with the customer usually having to buy expensive hardware like servers and storage to stand up the EUC environment.

Many vendors are pushing customers to move to subscription licensing models, so I thought it would be helpful to explore why subscription licensing is not only inevitable, but also very beneficial for everyone involved.

A lot of it has to do with adopting more of the benefits of cloud—without having to adopt a full cloud infrastructure or prepare for your migration to the cloud. Even the on-premises deployments of modern Unified Communications (UC) or Customer Experience (CX) solutions have already adopted many of the characteristics of cloud, as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology:

Organizations today have a multi-cloud presence. By that, I mean that on-premises data centers are no longer the standard in IT. Businesses require application mobility to meet the ever-increasing demand for data and information at light speeds, and thus it is very typical for an organization to have several deployments of multi-cloud data centers to fit these demands and needs. Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, Unified Communications as a Service, Edge, and IoT Computing are just a few of the potential multi-cloud deployments, on top of the on-premises and co-located data centers in different regions and geo-locations. 

2020 has been a groundbreaking year on many fronts. Unfortunately, the majority of them have not been good ones. On October 28, 2020, the FBI, HHS, and CISA jointly reported on an imminent threat to healthcare organizations (the Health and Public Health Sector) surrounding the Ryuk variant of ransomware and other malware most recently seen accompanying it. “We are experiencing the most significant cybersecurity threat we’ve ever seen in the United States,” said Charles Carmakal, Chief Technical Officer of the cybersecurity firm Mandiant, in a statement.

One of our Lead Solutions Architects at ConvergeOne (and a long-time member of the Ski Patrol), Leif Haslund, has told me that the most important piece of information to ask in an emergency is, “Where are you?” When an emergency happens and his team gets called, they must know where to go in order to give assistance.

The thought of migrating your entire business, with all its complexities, to the cloud, can feel daunting. However, the need to modernize has never been more urgent. In fact, it is estimated that 81% of companies with 1,000 employees or more have a multi-platform strategy. The number is expected to rise to more than 90% by 2024. Financially, worldwide spending on public cloud services is expected to grow to 73%, from $160B to $277B between 2018 and 2021. 

As most traditional network vendors are trying to build a cohesive solution through acquisition and integration, Cisco Meraki has had the integrated platform that other vendors are trying to create for quite some time. You owe it to yourself to take the time to get to know Meraki.

About 90% of colleges and universities see fewer than 70% of students graduate within six years. Clearly, student retention is a big goal for provosts and other institutional leaders. Higher Education is seeking ways to engage students to not only keep them rooted to the campus community, but also to ensure they graduate. Additionally, as campuses expand within their own footprint or to new locations, they look to modernize and future-proof investments.

It goes without saying that 2020 has been the most chaotic year of our lifetime, and changes we have experienced this year are likely to remain in place for the foreseeable future—if not indefinitely. The way that we collaborate with each other at work, the way our children are educated at school, and even how we spend our personal time with clubs, family, and church have changed.