Cyber Security and the Business Owner
By David Scott, Managing Member at Avid Communications
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the challenge faced by our clients when it comes to cyber security. And reading a lot. And getting lots of headaches.
Most of the material is jargon heavy, and reads like, “Sophisticated cyber attack vectors and multi-layer advanced threats, whether they target your siloed applications in multiple cloud fabrics, exploitative endpoints or permeate a shrinking remediation anomaly require sand boxing priorities and an exponential receding focus on the IoT through SaaS essentialities.” Just for fun, I paid a high-school kid $20 to graph that sentence.
I have an advantage as I plow through it because I can instant message a team of network security experts here at Avid who can give me an immediate explanation of what (some esoteric term) means and walk me through the material (usually at any time, day or night!) And then I can do a little translation of why a business owner should care about it.
And the more I learn the more passionate I get about making sure Avid’s clients have access to the best in cyber security at affordable prices. Because this stuff is genuinely scary!
Some general conclusions…
The first general conclusion I’ve come to is that most businesses are largely unprotected from today’s risks. Amazingly, this is true, even for some who have invested in the latest and greatest firewalls. Often the key functions aren’t even enabled!
The second is that it’s impossible to be completely protected. It would cost a fortune and make doing business so cumbersome that this level of security is impractical. But because there are a zillion things to worry about, the business owner can get all wrapped around the axle and then simply gives up – not really sure of even where to begin.
The third conclusion is that most of the cyber security services are targeted at big businesses, and so many of the recommendations don’t make any sense for the 25-person architectural practice, the 10-person law firm or the 50-person medical office. They require too much internal expertise to carry out.
These conclusions are driving us to provide new services under the general category of “next generation firewall.” After a long development period, we’re just beginning to roll them out. And I believe it’s the most important thing we’ve ever done for our clients.