Backing up your critical data should be a fundamental part of every data protection strategy. With ransomware breaches and recovery costs nearly doubling over the last year, at 66% up from 37% and $1.85M up from $760K respectively, organizations cited data backups as the #1 method used to restore compromised data.

For years now, multi-factor authentication (MFA) has been at the top of the cybersecurity best practices list. MFA has proven to curb data breaches due to compromised credentials (usernames and passwords), and according to Microsoft, 99.9% of cyber-attacks on company accounts are preventable with properly deployed MFA. This is a statistic no business leader can afford to ignore.

Now more than ever your employees are working on their own personal devices. Tasks such as sending emails, reviewing documents, accessing applications, and other business productivity actions are performed on personal devices as a matter of convenience, and for the business, the productivity benefits are appealing.

Does it ever feel like the programs and applications put in place to increase productivity, reduce risk, and control costs evolve and change faster than adoption strategies can occur within your company? In fact, it may even be that productivity decreases, causing costs and risks to increase; the exact opposite of what you are trying to accomplish.

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.