The COVID-19 global pandemic has forced the hand of businesses worldwide to allow their employees to work from home at extraordinary rates. But what does this mean for small business cyber security readiness?
Forget About Waterfall vs Agile...Bust Up Your Silos
Lately, while advising we’ve been asked by quite a few clients “Should we be using a Waterfall or Agile approach to managing our projects?”. The first few times this this question was asked, I “took the bait” and began to explain how each discipline fits a particular type of industry, project and/or team.
We have a process framework at Pandoblox that dives deep into the company’s business to understand their operations and objectives before recommending an approach to technology. Through this process, we quickly began to realize, it wasn’t a question of mismatched methodology at the root of their problem. It was the siloed teams allowed to develop over time at the root of their problem.
CCPA Are You Ready?
Most of us are just recovering from the GDPR panic of 2017. Some of us are old enough to remember the SOX panic of 2003. Still a fewer number of us remember the Y2K panic of 1999. [Granted, the former examples turned out to be a little more concerning than the latter.]
We have a new panic brewing on the horizon. If my read of human nature is accurate, we should start hearing about it in our tech circles around May and it should reach board-room frenzy-state by August or September.
Dismantling The Corporate Network
We were able to successfully meet both of these objectives by essentially dismantling the corporate network. Over the last year or so, we were able to build a robust toolset for our users by pushing most services out to cloud providers. File Share, Backup, eMail, Calendaring, PBX, Contact Center, Video Conferencing - we’ve moved it all external. For the most part, our server rooms are now only MDF/IDFs housing our switches for connectivity to our outside services. …And most importantly, our reliability went from hovering around 98% to 99.95%.
By simplifying our infrastructure, we were able to drastically improve our service reliability and security, as well as increase our users’ satisfaction.