Our internship program at Systems Engineering has always played a significant role in building a vibrant tech workforce community in New England. Through the years, our relationships with standout educational institutions, such as USM, Colby, UMO, and UNH, have provided the opportunity to meet exceptional students across New England who have a deep desire to build their skills in the IT Industry. This year, we contemplated how to move forward with our long-standing summer internship in the face of the pandemic. We wanted to ensure our program would adhere to social distancing guidelines, adapt around our new virtual office environment, and create a meaningful work experience for our incoming interns.

One of the most important documents  your organization can create is a Business Continuity Plan (BCP). This plan is a comprehensive review of how your organization will continue to operate when responding to unplanned disasters that impact business processes, applications, and IT infrastructure. We are all familiar with the burdens that the COVID-19 pandemic placed on businesses throughout the world. Companies that had a BCP in place were much more prepared than those without. The level of response this pandemic required highlighted the importance of business continuity planning and raised some unforeseeable questions that all companies should now ask themselves.

When it comes to cloud security, ensuring your sensitive data remains secure is a bigger challenge than ever. Cyberattacks are on the rise, and according to "The State of Ransomware 2020" report, businesses are attacked by cybercriminals every 11 seconds. The cost of these increasing attacks is anticipated to be around $20 billion by 2021.  So how can your small to medium-sized business (SMB) protect against these organized cyberattacks? Below we review data loss prevention (DLP), which is part of a multi-layer security strategy. DLP is designed to stop the accidental (or intentional) loss of sensitive information from an organization's network, before it's too late.

How much are the costs of a ransomware attack? Industry experts have estimated that in 2019 alone, the cost could have exceeded $7.5 billion. This has significantly increased from 2017 when Cybercriminals extorted $5 billion from businesses. Ransomware attacks are bad for business and growing in prevalence every year. In 2020, ransomware attacks have increased on law firms, hospitals, universities, city municipalities, and school networks. In September, a hospital in Germany suffered a ransomware attack that ultimately caused someone's death.

At the heart of any effective cybersecurity posture lies well-developed security policies and plans. You need these documents to demonstrate to stakeholders and employees how your company protects itself and its information technology assets. Safeguarding your most precious information assets is not just a job for hardware and software. It's also the responsibility of staff to be part of the solution. This can be accomplished by setting clear and effective password policies.

Every year, business leaders sit down to create annual IT budgets to define how much their organization will spend on technology in the coming year. As technology now permeates almost all aspects of our businesses, your IT budget should be approached strategically to allocate and spend IT dollars on investments that drive the most business value.

In light of the uptick in breaches at small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), I wanted to briefly review the cyberthreat landscape and offer some cybersecurity best practices organizations can implement to better position their businesses against the bad guys.

This year, many businesses had their 2020 IT budgets blindsided by the novel coronavirus. When the pandemic hit, business and IT leaders redirected and poured their IT dollars into digital transformation initiatives that created efficiencies and enabled the productivity of their remote workforces. As we look to 2021, lessons learned from 2020 coupled with a backdrop of economic instability will influence our technology spend in the coming year.

Has your company decided to transition a portion or all your employees to work-from-home long-term? What may have started as a temporary means to an end is working well, and you have decided to embrace this new way of doing business. What you need now is to ensure your remote employees can continue to get their work done as productively and securely as possible.