The promise of increased productivity in the cloud continues to ring true now more than ever. Access to corporate data from anywhere at any time while simultaneously collaborating as a team has kept so many businesses productive and competitive in our remote work environments. The caveat of access from anywhere is that without sufficient cybersecurity and risk management strategies, threat actors can also gain access to your sensitive corporate data.

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.

Cybersecurity incidents are on the rise and not slowing down. This year, the nation has seen malicious cyberactivity against private sector companies such as SolarWinds, Microsoft Exchange, and most recently, the Colonial Pipeline. Cybercriminals also took advantage of the chaos brought on by the pandemic.

Cloud is becoming the preferred way of operating business, with 90% of businesses using cloud computing in one form or another. This fact is not surprising given the numerous benefits a company can realize such as hybrid work flexibility, increased collaboration, scalability, and so much more. While many organizations embrace this major shift to the cloud, one thing that must be a priority is your cloud security posture. But what is cloud security exactly?

Data breach attacks are only getting more sophisticated and gaining more traction. They're happening to individuals at home, employees within organizations who click on the wrong link, CEOs who are targeted in a  Business Email Compromise, and the list goes on. What's even worse is that small- to medium-sized businesses are more of a target than the large corporations. According to Verizon's 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report, 61% of all data breach victims are businesses under 1,000 employees. 

In a recent presentation to business leaders, Kent Goodrow, a Systems Engineering client Account Manager, spoke about the evolution of identity and access management (IAM). He noted the increasing business exposure to modern threats due to work-from-anywhere, cloud-first environments. Kent detailed how IAM has evolved over the last few years and how it now works to protect access to corporate resources. Below is an outline of his presentation on implementing IAM as your organization's first line of defense.

On April 13, Microsoft released its monthly patches for vulnerabilities found within their products. In their release announcement, Microsoft strongly recommends prioritizing the CVE 2021 28481 security update which affects Exchange servers 2013, 2016, and 2019. This vulnerability allows hackers access to mailboxes to read or even exfiltrate sensitive information.