How IT Managed Services PROTECT Your Business

How IT Managed Services PROTECT Your Business

Protecting your business from breaches to your network is a critical business practice to have in place.  Our core philosophy around security is a layered approach. Here’s how IT Managed Services PROTECT Your Business when Connecting Point works with you.

  1. Our core philosophy around security is a layered approach: starting with external security. We look at ways malicious files and activity can get in the network from the outside via the Internet, for example. Having a managed firewall in place is one layer of protection from the outside. Our managed firewalls have the latest technology in detection, prevention, and reporting functionality.
  2. Protection from the “inside” (email filtering is really an external layer) is another layer. Internally (external) managed security services consist of many things. For example: email. By having a filter in place, the end user’s email is kept safe from malicious attacks, which can potentially save companies thousands of dollars.  Before an email even gets to a person’s computer or company email server, the email security filters identify malicious emails such as ransomware attacks or spoofed email. (See our case study below for more details about a spoof.)
  3. Another internally managed security service is, of course, anti-virus protection. A basic yet often overlooked piece of the security solution. Our AV not only looks for malicious files and signatures but actually analyzes the behavior of an end user’s system. This creates a higher detection and block rate of more advanced forms of malware.
  4. DNS (Domain Name Server) security scanning is another layer of how IT Managed Services PROTECT Your Business. Though it’s been around for a while, it’s, unfortunately, gaining in popularity. Here’s how it works:  if you go to your bank’s website, and if your computer is infected with a virus, it could be the kind of virus that is trying to send you to a malicious website. It might even re-route you to the real bank site, once it gathers your sensitive information, and you wouldn’t even notice it. The virus could have re-routed you to perhaps a website in Russia for example, that looks just like your bank’s website. This is becoming more prevalent because end-users are being targeted - instead of the network. Here at Connecting Point, we put solutions in place that are designed to help prevent this from occurring.
  5. Another way our managed IT services protect your business is with backups. Though you might not think of a backup as a way to protect your business, it’s actually one of, if not the most critical part. We maintain a copy of our client’s network and critical server data, at the client’s site but also in the cloud at a secure and redundant offsite data center. This is done so that IF any of the other layers of security are compromised, we have backups of their entire network. This is the ultimate safety net.
  6. Standardization is the one of the biggest and best ways we protect your business. We have numerous processes and procedures to standardize IT operations when we begin working with a client. Our company way, The Connecting Point Way, is our best practices list. Many companies / organizations might have their own system but it is inconsistent and/or out of alignment with industry standards. Each technical resource in our company follows the Connecting Point way of doing things so there’s complete consistency and control. When we get a new client, our biggest objective from day 1 is analyze where they’re at and compare them to our standardization list and then get them up to speed to where they should be. That’s our primary focus. We’ve also specifically partnered with vendors from across the world that help set best practices for the entire industry. This type of collaboration, along with our own 30+ years of experience and knowledge is what our standardization lists are made from.
  7. The ultimate way to protect your business is to train each and every end user within your organization and that’s exactly what we help our clients do. For example: thanks to our processes and training, users will end up knowing what a malicious email actually looks like. A common example is a spoofing attack. If the end user has not been trained to spot these spoofs, there could be dire consequences such as stolen money. (See below).Continual training is critical because things constantly change in the world of IT. The end user is actually a huge vulnerability for your company if they haven’t been trained properly.

Though there are many other ways that IT Managed Services protect your business, those are some of the most important items that we address with our clients on a regular basis.

Case Studies:

#1.) We had a client that had a spoofed email that posed as the CEO of the company. “He” wanted them to wire transfer $30,000 to a bank account. They thought it was coming from the CEO and would have allowed it to go through had it not been for the email filter that caught the message and tagged it as a spoofing attempt. The staff was able to identify that email and had a process in place for how to deal with it. Thanks to our tools and training that had been put in place as part of our Connecting Point Way, we saved the company $30,000. It’s not just about managed services but helping organizations come up with best practices that impact their day to day business.

#2.) Security Tool Working Well: one of our clients had a local mail server, physically on-site. The motherboard crashed, which caused the network to crash. Of course, we had a back-up server but it can take several hours to get everything operational from that type of a disaster. Our email security solution had “flip the switch” setting that allowed the end users to still get their email to any device they were using, their phones, computers, etc. This saved them from delayed customer service response and saved them 4-5 hours of complete downtime which could have had a huge impact on their customer service. Being able to have that kind of continuity in place was super important to the client.

All IT companies have “tools” to try to protect their clients but It’s not so much about the tools as it is about the process, the best practices, and the backend knowledge to strategically use these tools.

If you are in need of IT Managed Services to protect your business, please contact us.


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