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How to Keep Your Company Secure From Cyber Attacks

Running any small business demands a lot of time and effort. Unfortunately, many business owners don’t have the extra time and resources to think too much about cybersecurity. However, a lack of focus on IT security makes it much more likely for your business to become a victim of cybercriminals, whether it’s with phishing scams, ransomware, or other attacks. Partnering with an IT software and services provider is a great way to give your company much-needed cybersecurity protection while also helping you to stay up to date with the latest threats.

Here are a few key cybersecurity strategies an IT software and service provider can implement for your business.

Invest in IT Security Training

Ransomware incidents often happen due to employee mistakes. Even one simple error can lead to devastating consequences for your business. Training your team on how to recognize ransomware and other cyber threats is critical in today’s workplace. A managed IT service provider can educate your employees through ongoing IT security training sessions to ensure your team is well-prepared for the latest cyber attacks.

Back Up and Isolate Your Critical Data

Data loss can cripple daily business operations and significantly damage the reputation of a small company. For example, a ransomware attack can hold your information hostage unless you pay an expensive fee within a short period of time. However, creating data backups daily and uploading your critical information to the cloud can help you quickly recover this data without ever giving in to cybercriminals’ demands. These data backups are also stored in multiple areas in the cloud as an added layer of protection.

Require Strong Passwords and Two-Factor Authentication

Strong passwords are the first line of defense against attackers, so it’s important that you enforce a strict password policy in your company. But even with a good password policy, there’s still room for error—and hackers know it. To protect yourself from phishing attacks and other malicious techniques, you should require employees to use two-factor authentication whenever possible. Two-factor authentication means that when logging into an account, users must provide both something they know (like their email address) and something they have (like their phone number). This adds another layer of security to an otherwise vulnerable system by making it harder for hackers to access an account without having physical access to the user’s device or personal information like credit card numbers.

Conduct Regular Audits

One of the most effective ways to protect your company from cyberattacks is to conduct regular audits. Regular audits help you identify risks and vulnerabilities in your company’s system, which can then be addressed before they become major issues. The more often you audit, the more likely you are to discover a problem before it becomes a major issue.

Install Latest Security Updates

Keeping your software programs up to date is a top priority for any small business. These updates play a crucial role in patching any security vulnerabilities. Turning on automatic updates will ensure that your business receives these updates as soon as possible and minimizes the chances of experiencing a cybersecurity incident in the workplace. Automatic updates will also increase employee productivity, as they will not have to take the extra time to download each update manually.

Stay Aware of the Latest News in Cybersecurity

There are many ways to stay current with the latest news and developments in cybersecurity. One great way is to follow cybersecurity experts on social media. You can also read blogs and articles about cybersecurity, which can help you understand what is going on in the world of information security.

Another good way to stay current is by looking for new products or services to help your organization with its security needs. It’s important that you don’t be afraid to ask questions when doing this research.

Make Endpoint Protection a Priority

Endpoint protection helps you protect your company from cyberattacks in many ways. It can block ransomware attacks, phishing attacks, and zero-day exploits.

To protect your company from these types of threats, it’s essential to have an endpoint protection system that uses real-time scanning technology to detect and block malicious files before they enter your network.

Invest in API Management Software

It’s no surprise that a growing number of businesses are utilizing APIs (application programming interface) in their software and IT operations. As APIs become more and more critical to business, API security must also be a top priority for organizations. As with any other aspect of security, the key is to have a layered approach to API security.

Enter Layer7 API Management

Layer7 API Management by Broadcom Software has been built from the ground up with an API-first approach. It is a full lifecycle API management solution, allowing you to design, create consume, and secure APIs from a single platform.  While Layer7 provides a host of API benefits, Layer7 API Gateway, in particular, is extremely vital for API protection. 

Available as a standalone solution or as part of the complete Layer7 API Management solution, Layer7 API Gateway helps keep businesses safe from data breaches and cybersecurity attacks with its powerful toolset of OAuth, OpenID Connect, FIDO and more, ensuring companies meet the most stringent regulatory and compliance standards. Layer7 also allows you to monitor transactions across all layers within your application stack. It applies security at both the API layer and across the entire mobile channel to guarantee protection against OWASP top ten threats on all fronts. Watch this video to learn more about Layer7 and its advanced security features.

Conclusion

We’ve seen many ways to keep your company safe from cyberattacks, but using an API Gateway like Layer7 API Gateway by Broadcom Software is one of the most foolproof and trusted ways to stay safe. Contact us for more information about Layer7 or to find out how we can help prevent your organization from being a victim of devastating cybersecurity attacks.

The post Safeguard Your Business Against Cybersecurity Attacks appeared first on A&I Solutions.

Effective monitoring of advanced IT systems and infrastructure requires you to apply an integrated approach. This will help you attain visibility into all your business services and applications. An integrated enterprise IT monitoring software enables you to collect data and relate incidents.

Additionally, you can make fresh discoveries from new and current enterprise monitoring tools both in the cloud or on-premise.

What Are the Short-Comings of Silo-Monitoring?

Silo-monitoring refers to where every team monitors their system without bringing other teams on board.

Essentially, without the advanced enterprise monitoring tools, your security applications will be exposed to threats. So, you’ll spend hours fixing threats. Also, your staff will have recurring problems with several applications and will constantly get error messages.

That’s a monitoring failure that cannot be fixed by merely switching your phone number. Traditional monitoring is siloed. It involves having several teams using different tools to control your servers. With this approach, your team will spend a lot of time responding to application failure alerts bringing a halt to essential business operations. Besides, identifying and addressing the underlying problem will be an uphill task and will even increase downtime. That will hurt your business.

With siloed monitoring, you’ll have several tools to maintain and manage, countless system upgrades, and your team will need regular training. This approach will increase your expenses and reduce your income. The aftermath is fewer resources, poor customer experience, and probably business stagnation.

In Siloed monitoring, most applications in multiple systems rely on each other to enhance business functions. Nevertheless, it’s hard to diagnose problems that affect all systems since each team focuses on issues occurring in their systems.

In such a case, the teams may seek expert assistance, which is not a guarantee the cause of the problem will be established. And even if it does, the situation may have escalated, taking its toll on your business operations.

Do I Need IT Monitoring Software?

You need IT monitoring software now more than ever to cope with the distributed system, edge computing, and the cloud. Of course, you don’t want your business to be a reflection of immature monitoring.

That refers to a case where you have multiple monitoring tools and numerous processes. If that happens, your business curve will assume a downward trend. Also, that will result in a negative user experience and confusion in all your IT and business systems.

Why Are Enterprise Monitoring Tools a Good Substitute to Silo-Monitoring?

Integrated enterprise software is more effective since it uses a centralized system and a unique approach to collect, evaluate, forecast, and reveal overall system performance.

The primary goal of enterprise monitoring is to boost the availability of system applications. It also reduces time spent responding to enterprise system hitches. That increases productivity and the profit margin.

Enterprise application monitoring focuses on the infrastructure and uses information collected from the infrastructure to give insight to the IT team on how the underlying problem in all the systems affects the availability of the applications.

That makes it easy to fix the problem, and the entire team works as a single entity because they’ll be using the same monitoring tool. This approach reduces costly downtime and saves time and cost.

The following are benefits of integrated enterprise monitoring:

Boost Customer Experience

Your business’s success depends on its ability to appeal to new and existing customers. Most customers will stick to businesses that feature the current trends. Integrated enterprise monitoring ensures that applications are readily available and that they are operating at high speed.

Attain Visibility and Coverage across Multiple Microservices

Traditional monitoring is ineffective because it may not cover all microservices within a system. But centralized monitoring encompasses all elements, thereby boosting coverage and visibility for all microservices.

Improve Proactive Monitoring

Silo-monitoring is reactive. It alerts the team of an existing problem, and they are expected to fix it. If the problem only affects their system, that strategy works, although it leads to increased downtime.

However, a centralized monitoring strategy enables stakeholders to monitor all applications and services. That way, you’ll spot problems before they happen and interrupt operations.

Save Time and Money by Reducing Downtime Occurrences

An integrated monitoring tool forecasts problems in your IT system or infrastructure. Therefore, teams can address the issue before they cause downtime. That also reduces time spent fixing problems. This saves time and money and helps to improve your customer base.

Increases Return on Investment (ROI)

Every business person starts a business in the hope that it will have a higher Return on Investment. But this is not always the case, especially if the company has not embraced the current technology. Regular repairs, increased downtime, and rampant operation interruptions reduce ROI. You can increase ROI by ensuring that applications are always available. That’s the goal of integrated monitoring.

Forecasts the Future

The IT and infrastructure market is constantly advancing. Being able to predict the future helps you to get prepared in advance. That will give your business a competitive edge. An integrated enterprise monitoring strategy uses the data you provide to predict future trends. Moreover, it alerts you when to add extra resources to your server, preventing your applications from slowing down.

Speed-Up Innovation

Integrated enterprise IT monitoring software reduces the time spent fixing system hitches. That frees more time enabling your team to concentrate on other productive business activities.

Where to Find Top-Notch Enterprise Software Products?

A&I Solutions offers top-of-the-line enterprise software solutions by Broadcom. Broadcom’s enterprise software solutions help leading businesses transform their operations with intelligent, integrated software that enables collaboration and alignment across business operations and IT. From enterprise monitoring to continuous testing, business management, security and more, Broadcom has intelligent software solutions to meet any and all of your tech needs.

Contact A&I Solutions now to find out what world-class enterprise software solutions can do for you

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