Rutter Networking Technologies Blog

Last week, the former CEO of Equifax testified in front of the house energy and commerce committee regarding the massive data breach that his company fell victim to earlier this year. This breach caused the exposure of approximately 143 million U.S. consumers personal and financial information.

In his testimony, Richard Smith explained that the breach was caused by the failure of a single individual to properly communicate and act on a patch to a critical vulnerability.

“Both the human deployment of the patch and the scanning deployment did not work,” Smith told Congress. “The protocol was followed.”

In a recent Indeed survey of more than 1,000 hiring managers and recruiters, more than half (53 percent) of respondents have hired tech talent despite candidates not meeting the job description requirements. That may be a good thing for businesses in need of IT resources to fill gaps in their talent pool. While that alludes to the fact that businesses are working hard to meet their needs for IT talent in what must be creative ways, here are five of those ways that businesses can employ to fill the gaps in IT resources and talent.

Today, organizations are faced with the unique challenge of protecting critical assets and data from a more diverse and broad set of threats than ever before. Advanced malware and ransomware targeting the endpoint continues to evolve and morph at an incredibly fast rate.

Organizations often turn to cloud solutions because of the flexibility that “as a service” offerings provide. If you need more computing power, storage space, bandwidth, licenses, etc., those resources are rapidly at your disposal. There is no need to buy new hardware, install software, or upgrade your infrastructure to handle it, because your cloud service provider has it ready for you to meet any growth. Unfortunately, when these resources are so easy and quick to spin up, costs start to rise proportionately.

By far, the largest benefit of cloud computing is its scalability: You use resources as you need them. In high-usage situations, your cloud environment will stretch to meet these demands. In low-usage situations, fewer resources are consumed.

Moving a business’s offices is a complex task with a lot of moving parts that requires meticulous planning to ensure that operational impact is minimized. One of the key elements to keeping those operations and business processes moving is the wireless network.

Today, wireless rules the business world, from the corporation to the retail environment. That becomes clear with the 2017 Cisco Visual Networking Index that states that traffic from wireless and mobile devices will account for more than 63 percent of total IP traffic by 2021.That's both good and bad news for the businesses in the process of building, expanding, or upgrading their WiFi networks due to a host of factors. In order to avoid the negatives such as coverage, security, and excessive cost risks that can negatively impact the business, it’s imperative to start the process with a WiFi site survey.

According to the Ponemon Institute’s 2016 Cybersecurity Trends Report, 66 percent of business and technology professionals surveyed identified phishing and social engineering as top threats. This shouldn’t be surprising, as phishing and social engineering are primary sources of malware infiltration such as ransomware.

A recent Dell EMC study showed that participants saw 58 percent of their IT infrastructure transformation as having reached a higher level of maturation, which points to a glaring problem in terms of the remaining 42 percent. Consequently, businesses are increasingly finding that an evolving digital landscape requires an IT infrastructure that is adaptable, flexible, and agile.

According to the recently released 2016 H2 Global Threat Intelligence Trends report from global network cybersecurity vendor Check Point, ransomware attacks almost doubled in the second half of 2016 alone, with thousands of new ransomware variants. Clearly, the rapid and constant evolution of ransomware requires that businesses and enterprises move away from asking, “How does ransomware work today?” to “How will ransomware work tomorrow?”