ComputerWeekly.com published an article on cyber attacks on businesses that reviewed the findings from a British Chambers of Commerce Study.
Read the original article from ComputerWeekly.
While this is a UK based study, the findings can be applied to many organizations that have both greater or less than 100 employees.
1 in 5 Hit with Cyber Attacks
The study found that 1 in 5 UK firms had to deal with a cyber attack. Many of these firms had over 100 employees. There are many types of cyber attacks plaguing businesses – most notably and in the headlines currently are ransomware attacks.
Dependence on Outside Help
More than 60% of the firms reported that they need to rely on an IT provider to help resolve issues after an attack. As a contrast, it reported less than 15% of banks need to rely on an IT provider. This further illustrates the gap in IT resources that most firms face. For many firms, there are some benefits to using an IT provider.
Internal Solutions are Expensive
While firms can take matters in their own hands – it can be costly in terms of time and expense. Certain processes and frameworks help make firms more resilient to cyber attacks. However, they usually require multiple layers of security and on-going training of your workforce – so employees are aware and know how to defend against cyber attacks. Then firms should also look at their information systems to add protective layers around their perimeter network, while also monitoring within their network.
Finding the right resources to bring in-house is challenging and expensive. Finding security skills or cloud expertise is difficult. Given that scarceness of this skill, these individuals can be quite expensive to employ. For most businesses, it doesn’t make economic sense to have a high-end technical resource merely for monitoring the security of the business.
Using IT Providers
This brings us back to leveraging IT providers that are able to justify these high-end resources because the cost can be spread across support for multiple customer environments. Some IT providers are loyal to a specific set of vendors while others will design the service around each customer’s need. This involves different products and services – which ensures that they are constantly evaluating the best solution in the market for their customers. As an IT provider, they can also have economies of scale in establishing a SOC (security operations center) and NOC (network operations center) that can constantly monitor customer environments.
Other Solutions to Protecting Against Cyber Attacks
Some firms might be apprehensive about relinquishing all oversight over their security to an IT provider. There are ways to have a hybrid solution where some aspects can remain in control of the business, while the IT provider serves to fill in the gaps that exist due to the expense of having a full blown security operations center.
As a cloud service provider, dinCloud provides multiple layers of security for customer environments that are in a hosted private cloud. This enables a business to have control over their desktops, servers, applications and general data center operations while incorporating a foundation of security. For example, we provide perimeter defenses, intrusion prevention and also reputation filtering. Customers can always add their own software and services to the environment. Then, they can choose to have their IT provider manage the environment and also monitor it. Most IT providers working with dinCloud also offer security monitoring, or know of vendors that can help their customers defend against cyber attacks.
One of the headline-grabbing attacks, ransomware, can also be countered with dinCloud’s cloud backup services (dinBackup). This allows customers to take backups of individual desktops on a frequency such as 30 minutes. In case of an attack, customers can quarantine the infected desktop, spin back up another one in minutes, and then restore the backup from just 30 minutes ago to minimize productivity impacts and lost data. This is just one of the ways a customer can counter this particular type of an attack. A combination of dinCloud’s other defenses, coupled with an IT provider of security services can further strengthen the resiliency for a company’s environment. For more information visit dinCloud’s security page.
Cyber Attacks are Increasing
Taking the UK associations’ analysis – cyber attacks are only increasing. They are growing in volume and sophistication according to a joint report from the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre and National Crime Agency (March 2017).
As you can see from the lock on the dinCloud logo – security has been on the forefront of our mind and design from the start of our company in 2011. We always recommend customers set up hosted private cloud environments and add additional layers beyond what we already provide.
We are happy to guide customers in steps they can take and IT providers they can leverage to fend against cyber attacks.
