As more business owners utilize technology such as cloud computing, mobile devices and apps, the risk of hackers accessing money and sensitive business data becomes more real. The House Committee of Small Business addressed this issue March 21-22, 2013 during a special hearing called, “Protecting Small Businesses Against Emerging and Complex Cyber-Attacks.”

“Small businesses generally have fewer resources available to monitor and combat cyber threats, making them easy targets for expert criminals,” said Chris Collins, chairman of the House’s Subcommittee on Health and Technology. “In addition, many of these firms have a false sense of security and believe they are immune from a possible cyber-attack.”

WHAT IS THE STATUS OF SMALL BUSINESS SECURITY

• 71 percent of Small businesses are dependent on the internet for daily operation.
• 55 percent said if they lost internet connection for 48 hours, that it would be disruptive to very disruptive.
• Although attacks on small businesses don’t make the headlines, a recent report shows nearly 20 percent of cyber-attacks are on small firms with less than 250 employee.
• More than 80 percent of victims were targets of opportunity–which means they did not protect their Wi-Fi systems with passwords and otherwise had poor security, if any at all.
• 77 percent of small businesses believe their company is safe from a cyber-attack.

WHAT IS SMALL BUSINESS DOING TO PROTECT ITSELF

• Small firms are easy targets for cyber criminals. Many do not have the necessary security measures in place.
• 87 percent of small businesses have no formal cyber security plan and 69 percent no informal one.
• 90 percent do not have an internal IT manager focused on technology-related issues, so they are dependent on non-IT/security people to provide security or an outside security provider.

WHAT ARE THE COSTS OF SMALL BUSINESS SECURITY BREACHES

• Nearly 60 percent of small businesses will close within six months of a cyber-attack if it occurs, per this report.
• Cyber-attacks cost small and medium-size businesses an average of $188,242, and almost two-thirds of victimized companies are forced out of business within six months of being attacked.

RECOMMENDATIONS

With business and equipment outages occurring at such a frequent rate, not investing in a disaster recovery is gambling with your company’s very existence. Unfortunately, most businesses often face time and resource constraints that make it difficult to prioritize a disaster recovery plan. eSecurityToGo can provide you with a cost-effective solution to help prevent your business from being the target of a cyber attack. We recommend you take the following actions to protect your business:

1. Make yourself a difficult target by keeping your business secure.  Use security “best practices” to protect your business at a minimum.
2. The highest IT priority should be backup and system recovery.
3. Offload the heavy lifting to 3^rd parties that are security experts to help you:
1. Assess risk
2. Define Solutions
3. By providing managed security services to ensure solutions are installed, managed, monitored and maintained securely. These provide a vital role in companies with limited resources or expertise.
4. Don’t assume it cannot happen to you.  The cost is too high to take the risk of not being prepared. Get a free consultation today.

Research Sources:

• 2012/2011 nationwide study of small businesses (sub 250 employees) by digital security firm Symantec and the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA)
• Verizon study of data breaches in 2011

Disaster Recovery: Lessons Learned from Hurricane Sandy

As Hurricane Sandy tore up the Atlantic coast in late October, businesses lost an estimated $65.6 billion in losses due to damage and business interruption. Hurricane Sandy presented conditions that exceeded worst case scenarios that companies used to plan their disaster recovery and continuity efforts. Backup batteries and generators ran out of gas, vaults that held backup tapes were flooded, and communication lines into data centers were severed. Additionally, the IT teams were unable to get to work due to road closures and gas shortages.

A disaster like Hurricane Sandy is exactly why we encourage companies to invest in a disaster recovery plan. The next disaster may not come in the form of a hurricane, but to ignore the possibility of it impacting your business is gambling with your company’s very existence. The key question here is: what can be done to ensure a business can keep operating in case of a disaster?

Multiple Servers on Multiple Backbones in Multiple Cities

Being dependent on a single data center is never a good idea. It is a single point of failure. However, having multiple servers that are located close to each other can be risky as well. Hurricane Sandy took out companies’ primary data centers in New York and their back-up data centers in New Jersey, demonstrating the need to ideally have two fall backs, one nearby and one far away. Another effective solution is using the cloud as a data repository for your backups.

Out with the Old and In with the New

Companies that needed to transport tapes during the hurricane experienced many problems due to flooding and road closure. These companies had the longest recovery time, no surprise there. To avoid these problems, companies may want to consider moving to disk backup with deduplication. Other than very large archive storage, no business can afford the slow recovery time, the backup failure rates and the lack of quick access to specific data required by today’s businesses.

System Recovery

Productivity is not just about the data. It is about enabling access to the software that allows users to work with data. For example if a group of employees needed to access data on a physical server through the network in their office, and the servers were destroyed, loss in productivity is inevitable. It can easily take up to a week to purchase a new server, have it delivered, load the software, configure it and upload the copy of the backed up data onto the new server.

Fortunately, it is possible to set up disaster recovery servers that replicate the production environment. These standby servers can easily copy important data and make them available through a web portal, enabling companies to be back up and running in less than an hour.

In Conclusion

Natural Disasters like Hurricane Sandy highlights the importance of data backup and recovery, offering a chance to organizations to take the lessons learned and evaluate their disaster recovery plans. It is critical for businesses to take a more proactive stance to ensure availability and up time in the event of a disruption.

eSecurityToGo has recently partnered up with Veeam and ExaGrid to bring you the complete turnkey solution to your disaster recovery needs. Veeam® Backup & Replication™ provides powerful data protection for virtualized applications and data, unifying backups and replication into a single affordable solution. Additionally ExaGrid offers cloud-based disaster recovery as well as virtualized server recovery enabling fast restores and more efficient disaster recovery.

eSecurityToGo also provide Managed Data Disaster Recovery Service and can handle the complete process from policy creation to installation, testing, maintenance, and reporting. Call us, email or chat with a solution specialist to get the process started today.

It is becoming increasingly important for organizations to manage and protect their confidential information as the number of data breaches skyrockets into the millions. According to the Verizon 2012 Data Breach Investigation Report, there were 855 incidents and 174 million compromised records in the past year. Another study by the Ponemon Institute found that the average cost of a data breach is $6.75 million. One of the largest data breaches in the nation was the cyber attack on the South Carolina Department of Revenue, with an estimated 3.6 million Social Security numbers and 387,000 credit card records compromised.

It’s easy to think “that will never happen to me” when it comes to hackers stealing your business’s confidential information but victims of these data breaches range from small businesses to government institutions, including universities, banks, hospitals, corporations and non-profit groups.

Use this checklist to prevent your business from being a victim of a data breach:

• UTM/ Application Control Firewall
• Two-Factor Authentication
• Log Management & Event Monitoring
• Web Application Security
• Intrusion Detection/ Intrusion Prevention Services
• Employee Monitoring Software
• Network Monitoring
• Vulnerability Scanning
• Data Loss Prevention

eSecurityToGo works with the top tier vendors in the industry, including Dell, McAfee, WatchGuard, Palo Alto, Trend Micro, RSA, and Fortinet to provide you with the perfect solution to fit your needs. We also provide Managed Services for security and compliance. These services provide our customers with peace of mind and reduce their up front and ongoing workload and cost.

To learn how you can protect your business’s confidential information from a data security breach, visit us at http://www.esecuritytogo.com/ or call us at (866) 661-6685.

Disasters of all kinds strike businesses without warning every day. The average small-medium business experienced 6 outages in 2010. Most businesses are not prepared to have key servers, email, PCs and key data unavailable. Fifty percent of businesses have no disaster recovery plan in place at all.

With business and equipment outages occurring at a frequent rate, to not invest in disaster recovery is gambling with your company’s very existence. Threats come from outside and inside factors, and businesses are increasingly dependent on digital products and services. Statistics show that businesses that are not able to recover quickly are likely to go out of business.

The first step in acquiring a solution is to plan your digital disaster recovery solution.  

• Determine your maximum allowable downtime.
• How and where should your data be stored? We recommend Onsite and offsite.
• Do you want physical and virtual systems as well as data to be recovered?
• How much data do you have?  Prioritize the criticality of different data stores and how quickly it needs to be restored.
• How fast will your data grow and how will that affect your recovery plans?

As Dell’s Premiere Partner, eSecuritytoGo can provide you  with the perfect solution that is easy to implement and scalable to fit your needs a great price. In order to ensure that our customers’ needs are met,  we are excited to announce Dell’s Data Storage and Backup solutions that are easy to implement and scalable to fit your needs. Traditional storage leads to dead-end growth paths, limited point products, wasted capacity, system complexity and skyrocketing costs. Dell’s award winning storage solutions can take your organization’s storage environment to new levels of efficiency and agility. eSecurityToGo also provides Managed Data Disaster Recovery Service and can handle the complete process from policy creation to installation, testing, maintenance, and reporting.

Additionally, we sell Dell PowerEdge™ 12th Generation Servers and Dell PowerConnect Switches.  These powerful and innovative solutions are the result of acting on the requests of our customers to be a leader in this market. To learn more about the benefits that Dell’s innovations can bring to your business, visit http://www.esecuritytogo.com/category.aspx?categoryid=1477.

According to Global Industry Analysts, the Global Managed Security Services Market is expected to reach $8.4 billion by 2015. The ability to get hardware, software, and service bundled for a monthly fee, stay on top of ever changing technology, and to pay as you go has made managed services appealing to businesses of all sizes. Managed Services are significantly less expensive than internally managing IT with the advantage of having services performed by expert security personnel.

Organizations relying on managed services providers for some or all of their information technology are cutting significant annual costs, according to a study by CompTIA, a nonprofit association for the IT industry. As a result of their shift to outsourcing, 46 percent of firms have trimmed their annual IT expenditures by 25 percent or more, and 13 percent of these firms have cut down annual IT expenditures by 50% or more. “This is compelling evidence that managed services, even when implemented on a small scale, can deliver significant cost savings, freeing up cash for other business needs,” according to Carolyn April, director of industry analysis for CompTIA. “More importantly, these savings are accomplished without impacting the availability and reliability of the technology solutions the company relies on to conduct business.”

Managed Services companies are able to provide their services for an affordable cost because they are structured to become the IT department for multiple organizations. As a result, they have the right tools, processes, experience, and software allowing them to reduce their IT support cost.

The ComptTIA study also found that 89 percent of managed service customers are very satisfied or mostly satisfied with their experience. Requirements planning, agreeable contract terms, and the flexibility to easily and quickly add new services are key contributors to customer satisfaction. IT Managed Services companies work by fixing issues as soon as they arise, many times even before the client has noticed. 24×7 alerting means that the managed services company is aware of the issue and resolves it before it impacts their customer’s business. Because engineers have direct access to the system 24 hours a day, issues are resolved much more efficiently.

Amid its growing popularity is a realization that managed services doesn’t comply with a one-size-fits-all model. A company’s size as well as its complexity often determines the type of managed services it needs and eSecurityToGo understands that. eSecurityToGo provides scalable solutions from small to enterprise in all crucial areas of security and compliance. Managed security services can be provided for business continuity such as onsite/offsite data & system recovery, gateway security, endpoint security, email access control and compliance. eSecurityToGo works with the top security vendors in the industry to provide “best-of-breed” solutions. eSecurityToGo can provide customers with the total solution: products from leading brands, professional services, and managed services.

To view eSecurityToGo Managed Security Services, go to eSecurityToGo.com.

WatchGuard® Technologies, a global leader in business security solutions, announced that it received Common Criteria EAL 4+ Certification for its latest array of multifunction security appliances (WatchGuard XTM firewalls) and its extensible content, messaging and data loss prevention (WatchGuard XCS appliances) solutions. For government and enterprise network security administrators, EAL4+ stands as a key certification around the world.

“Government and enterprise organizations must have complete trust in the performance and reliability of the gateway security products that they deploy, as they are constantly faced with advanced threats that could disrupt operations or breach highly confidential information,” said Brendan Patterson, Senior Product Manager at WatchGuard Technologies. “Having EAL4 certification validates WatchGuard solutions and gives our partners and customers confidence in deploying unparalleled security solutions.”

Common Criteria evaluations involve rigorous analysis and testing to examine the security aspects of a product or system. Extensive testing involves comprehensive and formally repeatable process, confirming that the security product functions as claimed by the manufacturer. Security weaknesses and potential vulnerabilities are specifically examined during an evaluation. Read more »