Stormageddon

Call it Stormageddon, #HellaStorm, or just a massive downpour, but whatever you call the rains that hit the Bay Area on December 11, you probably couldn't call your office.  High winds and flooding knocked out power to more than 300,000 homes and businesses across the region.  San Francisco was hardest hit, with much of the northern half of the city, including the Financial District and Embarcadero Center, shut down from about 7:20am until late in the afternoon.

For companies with on premise phones and servers that lost power, it was a lost day.  For those whose IT services are hosted at offsite data centers, even December 11 was business as usual.

If you're worried that a storm might wash away your productivity or revenues, contact Xantrion.  We can help you create a disaster preparedness plan that keeps your head above water.

Use Case: Wealth Management Firm

A wealth management firm was increasingly concerned about the risks and inconveniences of maintaining decades of confidential client financial data on site.  Although off-site backups were performed regularly, downloading data to new hardware after a disaster would be slow and risky.

Learn how the firm improved disaster preparedness and tackled other IT challenges in the process.

DOWNLOAD GUIDE 

http://www.itservices.xantrion.com/use-case-wealth-management-firm.html

File Sharing: Requirements, Services, and Best Practices

Despite their obvious productivity benefits, cloud-based file sharing services raise concerns about who controls the content being shared and whether it’s adequately secure for business. This paper examines these questions and explores file sharing options, cloud-based and otherwise, to help you decide what’s right for your business.

DOWNLOAD GUIDE 

http://www.itservices.xantrion.com/file-sharing-guide.html

Disaster Preparedness: The 7 Common Mistakes to Avoid

In a disaster that knocks out business-critical systems, the company with the best plans for recovery has the best chances of bouncing back. Our new guide discusses the most common disaster preparedness mistakes your company can make and sets out best practices for avoiding them.

DOWNLOAD GUIDE »http://www.itservices.xantrion.com/disaster-preparedness-guide.html

Fox Small Business News Reaches Out to Xantrion for Disaster Preparedness Expertise

While everyone thinks about creating a remote worker environment after a major disaster, it’s something that should be on the books and tested all the time. Fox Small Business News reached out to Xantrion for their expertise on how small businesses should prepare.  For more on preparing for a disaster click here.  For more on Xantrion click here.

Financial Executives International Posts Xantrion Cybesecurity Protection Guide

Given the challenging cybersecurity environment and Xantrion’s expertise, Financial Executives International helps members protect themselves by posting Xantrion’s cybersecurity risk assessment best practices guide.  For a summary of the guide, click here.  For more on Xantrion click here.

Introducing a New Malware Blocking Service at No Charge

We've recently implemented a new security service which can help block access to websites that are known security risks. In addition to stopping malware infections before they start, this service can also help to prevent infected computers from connecting to the servers that control malware, thus rendering it harmless in many cases. We are providing this service at no additional cost to further reduce our clients' relatively low rate of malware infection. For more information, contact Christian Kelly, Director of Technology, ckelly@xantrion.com.

New Cybersecurity Video

This summer, Xantrion and its partners in legal, insurance, and auditing held a well-attended event in San Francisco, entitled The Keys to Mitigating Risk in The Digital Age. We captured the highlights for you in a short video.

VIEW VIDEO »

Learn About the Pros and Cons of Tracking Employee Activity

In deciding whether or not to monitor employees’ use of IT resources, organizations must wrestle with the balance between protecting corporate interests and respecting employee privacy. Download Whether and How to Implement an Employee Activity Logging Program to learn about the pros and cons of tracking employee activity and about best practices for creating a logging strategy that avoids potential pitfalls.

DOWNLOAD GUIDE »http://www.itservices.xantrion.com/employee-monitoring-guide.html

One of the Best Things You Can Do for Your Company

You do a number of things to maintain your business: update insurance policies, upgrade equipment, and conduct personnel reviews, just to name a few. Given the challenging cybersecurity environment, adding a cybersecurity risk assessment to the list makes sense. Learn the 5 critical elements of a cybersecurity assessment.

Get your complimentary copy of our guide today.
http://www.itservices.xantrion.com/cybersecurity-risk-assessment-guide.html

BYOD Best Practices

Your employees are almost certainly bringing their own smartphones, tablets, and even laptops into your workplace. The Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) trend delivers plenty of benefits, of course, including reduced capital costs and increased productivity. In fact, IT research giant Gartner predicts that by 2017, half of employers will not just allow, but require employees to supply their own devices. On the other hand, as we discussed a few months ago, the key to implementing a successful BYOD program is striking a balance between productivity and security.

Whether you're requiring BYOD or just allowing it, you need a strategy to manage it — in other words, tools and policies that lock down your employees' mobile devices enough to protect your data, but not so much that they can't do their jobs. 

Xantrion can help you tailor a BYOD strategy to meet your specific needs, but the first step is to understand what your needs are. Our new BYOD Best Practices guide will educate you about the most important issues in easy-to-understand terms so you can begin to make choices about your options.

Click here to read the guide, then give us a call to discuss how we can help you strike the right balance with your BYOD program.

Cybersecurity Recommendations from our Risk Mitigation Event

As underscored in our panel discussion on May 21 at the City Club of San Francisco, cybercriminals are getting much more sophisticated. The number of attacks keeps escalating, and that means as a business owner or manager you must be extra vigilant. The following is a summary of our panel’s recommendations for mitigating risk:

• Take a multi-disciplinary approach- financial, IT, audit, insurance, legal
• Follow your banker’s advice to prevent fund transfer fraud
• Technical controls only go so far; adversaries are using sophisticated social attacks so procedural defenses are just as important as technical defenses
• Review vendor agreements, in particular for insurance requirements and indemnity
• Get an audit so you can sleep at night and provide assurances to insurance carriers and business partners of good practice
• Consider a specific cyber insurance policy
• Discuss your Breach Response Plan with your lawyer before you have a data breach incident

We’ll continue to keep your informed about cybersecurity and the latest recommendations for protecting your organization from threats. If you haven’t done so already, consider subscribing to our newsletter- we cover information about cybersecurity regularly. 

SMBs Need to Protect Themselves More Than Ever

We mentioned in October that 2013 marked an all-time high in attempted cyberattacks on our clients. It turns out we aren't the only ones noticing the trend — around the world, hackers have stepped up their attacks on companies of all types and sizes. Target's disastrous recent data breach has grabbed headlines, but we want to emphasize to small and midsize businesses (SMBs) that their smaller size doesn't make them immune. In fact, SMBs need to be more on guard than ever.

According to Verizon's 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report, companies with fewer than 1,000 employees accounted for 40% of last year's data security breaches worldwide. In fact, 31% affected companies with fewer than 100 employees. And when you rule out accidental breaches, the numbers get even more eye-opening: Symantec's 2013 Internet Security Threat Report says 50% of all deliberately targeted attacks were aimed at companies with fewer than 2,500 employees.

Putting it bluntly, hackers see SMBs as low-hanging fruit:

1. An SMB's assets are just as valuable as a larger company's, but its defense strategies are likely to be weaker.

2. Hackers have lots of smaller companies to choose from.

3. Hackers who compromise a smaller company's infrastructure can then use it to springboard into the systems of its larger partners, vendors, and customers.

Don't make the mistake of assuming your company is too small to be a victim of cybercrime. Let Xantrion help you assess your risks and draw up a remediation plan that will both prepare you to respond to a data breach and prevent one from happening in the first place.