IT Security – Call Your Local Sheriff

IT security is necessary because of greed. Your data is gold that other people want access to, and they’re bound and determined to control it by fair means or foul.

Local private cloud service providers like Stack41 deal with protecting local business applications from greedy outsiders all the time. IT security is like the Wild West, and local private cloud providers are like the local Sheriff working with their customers’ IT teams to protect businesses against bandits.

There are lots of big reasons to host applications in the cloud, but security is probably right at the top of the list. You might say: “I have a really good firewall” and trust that it will keep you safe. To a degree, that’s true, but it won’t protect your data on its own. You have to give it a fighting chance by preparing other areas of your IT security to do battle.

If you have a system, application or machine in your entire organization with outdated software you could be exposed to a security breach. It’s really that simple.  Your data may be protected from being stolen, but a hack by the bandits will do damage to your business by corrupting data, deleting data, destroying databases, installing ransomware; the possibilities are endless.

There are many reasons for failure to update software. Your budget might be too tight to buy new hardware to run a newer version of software, you might be afraid that an update might “break” your application, your IT person might have left your organization, you might not have an IT person, your IT integrator might not fully understand your business, and the list goes on.

There’s also the possibility that a custom application might be judged too expensive to be rewritten to accommodate a new software version, and so faith is placed on the chance of not being targeted or an attack not being fully exploited, but that’s an entirely different subject and one even your local Sheriff can’t fix for you.

Whatever the reason, you must understand that bandits constantly probe your systems for weaknesses and your software must be updated as soon as possible. Most of the surveillance consists of automated bots that detect a software weakness, attack it and enter your systems, effectively through the front door. If your software is not up to date, your firewall may not protect you.

The “good news” is that your trusty firewall may protect you from the bandits making off with your data by denying command and control of your systems, but it won’t protect you from ransomware and vandalism, so the damage that will be done while they are inside can be considerable and very costly.

The really good news is that much of this can be avoided with a strong relationship with your local Sheriff, a trustworthy private cloud services provider. All of those reasons for vulnerability that are caused by old hardware and other IT problems become moot. The service provider will host your applications on their hardware (which is able to run your software) and provide the expertise necessary to advise you and work with your IT partners on a strategy to avoid such future issues.

One of the incidental benefits of becoming a local cloud customer is that by having applications “live” in the cloud, your local Sheriff can help you make sure future software patches are applied in a test environment first, to ensure they don’t break the application before they go into production.

Our advice to you is to start a conversation with your local Sheriff so that together you can protect your gold from the greedy bandits.