The Top Tools We Use for Security and Why We Use Them
A Q&A with Connecting Point’s Director of Managed Services Jesse Rosales
The IT security market is saturated with tools to protect against ongoing threats like ransomware and data loss. It’s a lot to sift through, and when companies try to choose their own technologies, it is often based on price. There are a number of factors that you should be looking at instead, to make sure that your technology fits your budgets and does a good job of protecting you.
To help, we sat down for a little Q&A with Connecting Point’s Director of Managed Services, Jesse Rosales. Jesse has been a part of the Connecting Point team for 6 years, and has extensive experience working with security technologies in the IT industry.
Q: A lot of clients want to reduce ransomware. What tools does Connecting Point use to do that?
A: We use a few, but I want to mention two specifically. Most ransomware attacks happen through email. Mimecast is an email security tool that scans and evaluates emails before the end user even sees it, removing a lot of those bad emails before they can do any damage. For emails that do get through, Cisco Umbrella is a cool filtering device that sits on the user’s PC and will scan websites that they attempt to go to, to make sure that it is a legitimate website. If it’s not, it will send a pop up warning and block the website.
Q: Can you talk about the firewall tools that we use?
A: SonicWall is the only firewall we use and it’s pretty incredible. Their main database talks to all of the SonicWall instances deployed worldwide. So, if the Mile High stadium (which uses SonicWall) gets targeted with an attack, that information gets shared with the main Sonicwall protection database and all the other endpoints around the globe, will now be protected from that same attack. It’s an amazing technology and helps make Sonicwall one of our most critical security vendors.
Q: Are these tools expensive?
A: No, these tools are very affordable. For our managed services clients, we work with a wide variety of tools to ensure that Connecting Point clients are protected from malicious activity and threats. Some of these tools, like Mimecast and Cisco Umbrella, to name two, are scalable in price. Clients pay only for the active users in their network and can add or remove users any time. The billing is on a monthly basis with no major expenses up front to implement. This makes it very affordable on the front end and over the lifetime of the service.
Q: Are there any security technologies that are new for Connecting Point?
A:Yes, we just partnered with Duo, which offers two-factor authentication. That means computers, data and applications can be protected with a password and something else, like a text message, an email or even a retina scan. It’s really powerful and adds another layer of security in protecting data, regardless of where that data lives or how it is accessed.
Q: There are a lot of security technologies on the market. How does your team select which security tools to use?
A: Yes, there are a ton of options out there. The engineers at Connecting Point have carefully evaluated any new security offerings before we add them to our client security stacks. We only offer tools that meet industry best-practices and can best address the challenges our clients face in their business. We utilize all our tools on our own technology too, so we have a full understanding of how these tools work in the client’s environment. We also want to make sure that we work reputable vendors who support their solutions. We want to ensure that any security solution we offer will create great value for the investment our clients make. I’m confident that these tools do that.
Who is picking out your security technology? We can help. Contact Connecting Point at 970.356.7224 or online.
