Managed IT Services Blog

There was a time when it took small businesses a great deal of convincing that they needed to take network security seriously. Today, thinking about security is critical for all Boston businesses, regardless of size. The data behind this speaks for itself—Small Business Trends reports that:

• 43 percent of all cyberattacks target small businesses.
• 60 percent of companies go out of business six months after a successful attack.
• 48 percent of data breaches occur as the result of malicious intent; the remainder is due to human error or system failure. 

When it comes to F5 BIG-IP and specifically F5 LTM products it can be easy to think of them as a mechanism for load balancing traffic and nothing more. What can be overlooked is that these devices are highly intelligent and offer a diverse range of ways with which you can optimize your traffic and further protect your network.

According to TechGenix, it is estimated that 78 percent of all small businesses will adopt cloud technologies by the year 2020. This estimation makes sense when you consider the cost savings that small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) find after they move to the cloud. As the popularity of cloud computing with SMBs grows, so does the interest in Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a cloud provider. This is expected as AWS remains the dominant force in the market, even when compared to heavyweights like Microsoft and Google.

As I sat down to write this article news broke of yet another major flaw affecting Windows systems. This time it’s a remote code execution vulnerability in Remote Desktop that could be exploited by a hacker via a worm making this a particularly dangerous flaw—view the details of this vulnerability. So it’s time to get patched!

When the global average cost of a data breach is $3.86 million dollars, you can be assured that businesses take notice. This number alone should be enough to convince anyone to take networking security seriously. However, cost savings and an untarnished reputation aren’t the only advantages that networking security brings to your business.

Once the decision has been made to stage an Active Directory site in a cloud tenant, there are some core principles which should be noted.

There was a time when both business leaders and IT leaders avoided the cloud, citing security as one of their top reasons to keep data, applications, and infrastructure out of the cloud and on-premises. Although this line of thinking was relatively recent, it is a myth that has since been dispelled. Cloud providers such as Amazon bring highly talented, security-focused people to their teams to help businesses better secure things on their side. 

Microsoft recently noted the findings of the "Organizational Security & Compliance Practices in Office 365," a 37-page report conducted by CollabTalk LLC and the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University. Key takeaways from this paper are:

Any project your IT staff implements, whether it involves computer networks, cloud services, or mobile capabilities, is done with the sole purpose of helping drive business goals forward. Well-thought-out projects that undergo proper planning often do just that. One area that has the capability to completely disrupt the technology that many businesses rely on is network reliability. Network reliability issues cause things to run slowly because of latency, or even result in complete downtime during which no business can be completed. When people aren’t able to work, your company loses money.

When it comes to cloud infrastructure services, Amazon Web Services (AWS) still reigns at the top of the list for cloud infrastructure services with more than 30 percent of the market share. By comparison, the second-most popular cloud service, Microsoft Azure, comes in at approximately 15 percent.