Managed IT Services Help SMBs Fight Cyber-Crime
3 min read
Until recently, managed IT services only included IT security as an add-on. Your IT support company would be responsible for installing and maintaining your network, including software updates, patches and fixes, and keeping your equipment running smoothly. IT security was often limited to the installation of a firewall and anti-virus applications. But with the growth in both the volume and the sophistication of cyber-crime, cybersecurity has become a major responsibility of IT teams. In larger companies, entire new departments have been created for network security, often with new executives in charge. New positions such as Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) are becoming common. Managed IT services have become extremely important, but many small to mid-sized businesses are not financially equipped to support a new IT-based team much less a new “C” level position. Novatech can help you deal with this situation extremely well.
The History of Cyber-Crime
Cyber-crime has become an easy to enter “vocation”. In the past, if some hacker decided to break into a company’s files, lock them down, and hold them for ransom, or wanted run a scam based on the millions of dollars he was “holding” for you, he had to start at “square one” and develop the software for this on his own. When you think about it, it is truly a daunting task. In fact, it was such a large project that entire criminal enterprises were established to generate the software required to accomplish these evil deeds.
Things have changed for the wannabe criminal. All he (or she) needs to do is dig around the dark web to find the off-the-shelf software needed to go into the crime business. Easy! Basic criminal software can be purchased for as little as $200 with a number of high tech upgrades available…and even a toll-free support line.
How Managed IT Services Fight Cyber-Crime
How have companies been handling this? Large companies, as we stated above, are spending large sums of money for protection. Not only are they hiring entire teams to deal with this situation, they are also spending the big bucks on hardware and software.
Smaller companies find themselves in a different position. First of all, many small to mid-sized businesses make (the very bad) assumption that they are safe because why would a cyber thief even bother with them? Wouldn’t they go after the big guys? Isn’t that why we hear about the IT break-ins at companies like Target, Equifax, Home Depot, etc.? This is a very, very bad assumption. Yes, sometimes you hear about the large thefts of customers’ personal data because that’s how the news cycles run. But, in reality, the criminals know that these big companies are spending millions on security and that the smaller company is now the low hanging fruit. Today, the vast majority of cyber-attacks are against small to mid-sized businesses.
Fear not! There is an excellent, cost-effective and highly efficient answer to this problem. Managed IT services companies like Novatech are well-equipped to protect their clients’ IT infrastructures. At Novatech, we have been working with small to mid-sized companies since 1992 and we are part of a nationwide team of Managed IT services companies that develop and maintain a unique and proprietary Crypto-Containment System that identifies infected data within your IT networks, locks it down, and isolates it before it can spread through the rest of your network. We would love to show you how this works, as well as other cybersecurity measures we can provide, and how these can cost-effectively bring your internal cybersecurity to a new level. Give us a call today at 770-569-4600.
