In our modern world, it’s not so much if a cyberattack strikes your business, but when. For example, ransomware attacks (just one of the many forms of cybercrime) occur every 11 seconds (CISA 2021). When considering that stunning statistic in the context of the myriad ways that cyber criminals can target your organization, it becomes virtually impossible to wrap your mind around how common cybersecurity issues really are.
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.
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.
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.
