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.
If you suspect that now is a good time to migrate your email to the cloud, you are probably correct. Sixty million organizations have already made that decision, and cloud email adoption continues to accelerate. Email is business-critical in most organizations, and there are many good reasons to migrate the lifeblood of your communications system to the cloud.
IT departments are under constant pressure to build modern applications that improve customer experiences, automate workflows, and meet business objectives. Often, these applications are built on open-source platforms that contain costs and deliver proven functionality. But there’s one problem with open-source software. Cybercriminals can access the very same software development kit (SDK) that developers use. And because they know you’re building the application package with these open-source libraries, they’ll inherently see where the security flaws are—and be able to identify whether or not you’ve hardened the application.
Cyberattacks are coming at every organization from all directions, and the numbers are astounding. There were 2.5 billion malware attacks and 2.5 trillion intrusion attempts in the first half of 2021 alone. Among the most common cyberattacks, ransomware has been daily headline news for a good reason. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), from January to July 31, 2021, 2,084 ransomware complaints were received, reflecting more than $16.8M in losses, a 20 percent increase in reported losses compared to the same time frame in 2020.
The statistics are alarming. By mid-year 2021, the vast majority of breaches—85 percent—involved a human element. And 91 percent of breaches start with a phishing attack. These social engineering schemes put your employees squarely in the crosshairs of hackers. And that’s why you need to reinforce secure cyber defense practices with your employees. A successful attack can be incredibly costly in terms of downtime and damage to your business’s reputation, ignoring for a moment the costs that follow if you can’t get your data back at all.
