data breach

What you need to know to protect your company

The modern office requires that all components of your business environment work together harmoniously to ensure the best use of your IT infrastructure and seamless scalability as your business grows. One of the major components of the modern office is business continuity. This is an imperative piece of a solid IT plan for every company regardless of size or industry.

Business Continuity

When IT professionals discuss business continuity, they are generally referring to a proactive approach of having the right processes and procedures in place to ensure mission-critical functions continue to work properly in the face of a disaster or while a business is recovering from one. When it comes to business, there are many moving parts that still need to continue operating smoothly whether your company experiences a devastating fire or a nasty data breach.

The IT and business statistics are shocking. In the last five years, one in three organizations were hit by a virus or malware attack, according to DataCore, and more than half of companies (54%) experienced downtime that lasted more than eight hours. That’s a full day of work lost! While DataCore shows only 35 percent of outages are caused by natural disasters, 45 percent of outages are operational and another 19 percent are due to human error. These site outages can cost businesses thousands of dollars in lost revenue and restoration costs for every incident. Gartner, Inc., a global research and advisory firm, estimates that only 35 percent of small and medium businesses (SMBs) have a comprehensive business continuity plan and the financial loss for every hour of downtime can reach into the thousands even for SMBs.

Business continuity requires comprehensive planning before tragedy strikes an organization to allow them to overcome long-term challenges that would otherwise stop them in their tracks. With prior planning, business continuity ensures your entire business returns to full functionality as fast as possible following a crisis. That means everything from vital employee records and payroll to stored data access and email.

Think Cybersecurity

One of the first steps in a complete cybersecurity plan is business continuity. To start, you’ll want to ensure your business employs the best technology to combat the latest threats from ransomware and malware to other types of breaches. This means updating protections such as antivirus and firewalls, using multifactor authentication, and engaging your employees in ongoing, meaningful cybersecurity training.

Cybersecurity plans, which are typically handled internally by the chief information security officer (CISO) in larger businesses, should be designed as a living document that can expand and adjust when necessary to meet the changing needs of your business. Small to medium enterprises often don’t have a dedicated CISO so they can outsource this responsibility to organizations like ORAM Corporate Advisors.

Written Information Security Plan

As part of your business continuity plan, you’ll need a written information security plan (WISP), which also happens to be a requirement of many regulatory bodies, especially for businesses who contract or subcontract with the government and financial institutions. While government regulations vary from state to state and with the federal government, in Massachusetts this written document should contain, “certain minimum administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to protect” personal information such as names, driver’s license numbers, social security numbers, and financial account numbers. You’ll need to check with both your state and federal government to determine which regulations impact you as well as any industry-specific regulations. This is another place a CISO or third-party IT vendor can help.

Your WISP should designate an individual responsible for maintaining your IT program. This may be a business owner, CISO, or even a trusted advisor such as ORAM. It will also need to identify any reasonably foreseeable data security risks as well as protect and restrict access to electronic data that may include personal information for your employees and/or clients. This plan should also outline the oversight of third-party service providers and ensure those providers comply with local, state, federal, and industry regulations as well.

Because your business and its processes, risks, and procedures are unique, your WISP will be very specific to your organization. It cannot effectively protect you from culpability in the event of a breach or loss if it doesn’t address the particular risks of your company or if it includes practices that have not been put into practice in your business. Through coordination with your IT team and/or third-party IT vendor, you will need to identify “reasonably foreseeable risks” to ensure your WISP includes the practices your business adheres to.

In addition to IT functionality, your WISP will also address the non-technical operations that will still need to work in a disaster situation to keep your business moving forward. For example, it might address the accounting measures you have in place to keep employees and bills paid and clients invoiced if the worse should happen.

What Crisis Looks Like

Stolen laptops, lost cell phones, and an employee clicking on a phishing email that infects your entire network. These are all crisis that can and often do occur in the business world. Think of all the critical information that can be lost, stolen, or even held ransom. What do you do and who do you talk to? This is where planning ahead and having a WISP helps. It will outline how to respond to a variety of incidents.

Lost your company cell? Your WISP will inform you of who to call to wipe the lost phone and deactivate it before serious damage can be done. Did your organization experience a data breach? Your WISP will have identified a data backup plan so that nothing is completely lost. Has a virus made accessing email impossible? Your WISP will have determined if your email is stored locally, in the cloud, or both to decide how to get it up and running again fast. This thinking ahead with recommendations by your IT team or third-party vendor will help ensure you have continued access to business email which is the lifeblood of most commerce today.

Recovering from Incidents

One of the best things your WISP will do is outline policies and procedures for how to react and recover in a crisis situations. Regardless of the disaster that strikes, your WISP will point you to who to contact and how to react. Part of your WISP will address incident response and crisis management to minimize the impact when things do go awry, as they inevitably do.

Incident response and crisis management involves having the ability to maintain critical business functions during a disaster scenario. It also encompasses having plans in place for a rapid recovery from catastrophic incidents. If your business were to experience a flood, fire, or data breach today, would it be able to recover quickly and efficiently? Business continuity is all about having a plan in place that expects the unexpected and is prepared to handle it.

When it comes to IT and business continuity, the big question is, “How do you operate tomorrow?” If you don’t know the answer, it’s time to get a plan in place starting with an evaluation of the foreseeable risks your organization may face and a WISP to address them. Think of it as an insurance plan that also helps your business with regulatory compliance. When disaster strikes, your business’s IT team, CISO, or third-party IT vendor should have already given you advice. Hopefully, you have followed it. Then you know who you can call when things go wrong so they can tell you how to react to keep your business moving full-steam ahead.

If your company or organization needs assistance with risk assessment, developing a WISP, and planning for business continuity, call the trusted advisors at ORAM today at (617) 933-5060 or visit us online. Our experienced professionals are here to help and we are dedicated to partnering with small businesses to assist them in achieving success.

By Ryan O’Ramsay Barrett

Being in IT, we hear about it all of the time. A client calls us in distress because they used the same password on multiple websites, social media platforms, and their email and now they’ve been hacked. The bad guys have access to several of their digital platforms, if not all of them, and things are a mess. The worst part is, the entire scenario could have been easily avoided.

One of the simplest and most commonly recommended cybersecurity practices promoted by experts to prevent problems like the one above is for people to use a password manager. Some are free and others cost a small annual fee but all of them are highly recommended over not using one at all.

What is a Password Manager?
A password manager is a type of software that assists in generating and retrieving complex passwords with the goal of improving your cybersecurity. One of the greatest issues is that most people either use the same password on multiple accounts or their passwords as just too simple. Using the same password for multiple sites can increase the risk that you will be hacked or that your business will experience a data breach. Overly simple passwords also make people more susceptible to being victimized by cyber criminals who would love to get their hands into our bank accounts, business data, and personally identifiable information (PII).

Consider a password manager as a vault of sorts, able to store multiple passwords in an encrypted database or produce them on demand. This means you don’t have to reuse the same password for various accounts, memorize them yourself, or write them down.

Regardless of how many passwords you have or how complex they may be, a password manager can keep track of them for you. Additionally, when you need a stronger password for a new account or to better secure an existing one, a password manager can generate a new, complex password for you.

Security Benefits
According to MyGlue, more than 60 percent of all data breaches are the result of weak or stolen passwords. By using more complex passwords that feature uppercase and lowercase letters, numerals, and special symbols, that are unique to each of your accounts, you are protecting vital online information from credit card numbers to the answers to your security questions. Not only is this important in your personal life but it is imperative to your business as well. Password managers help by generating unique, complex passwords that will not be easily guessed by bad actors.

Another sobering statistic is that more than 30 percent of employees keep track of passwords by writing them on Post-it Notes, according to MyGlue. This is not a secure or suggested form of storing passwords. With a password manager, you only have to remember a single master password to access your “vault” with all of your passwords in one place.

Business efficiency is also improved with the use of a solid password manager because employees won’t have to waste time resetting passwords or searching for that sticky note that disappeared. There will also be a reduction in requests to IT for password resets.

Password managers can also simplify shopping. Payment information can be stored in your password manager so that it’s all at your fingertips when you are ready to shop online.

Risks of Password Managers
I know what you’re thinking. If a hacker gets access to your master password, that would allow them access to all of your accounts. Bad actors have also been known to breach the central vault of password managers. The good news is that there are defenses available to address both of these concerns.

First, any password manager worth its weight is going to employ multifactor authentication. This means that when you, or someone else, attempts to access your “vault” of passwords, you will be sent a text or email with an authentication code to log in. If someone were to steal your master code, you would find out via a text message or email. No one can access your credentials without having both the correct password and the right authentication code. This gives you time to change your master password and notify your password manager should a problem arise.

Vendors usually protect master vaults as well by encrypting your password information locally. That information is encrypted and stored, on servers operated by the vendors who, in most cases, employ some of the best cybersecurity measures available. Some of the free password managers don’t offer the same higher level of security that paid password managers do. Be sure to do your research before signing up with a company or touch base with us at Oram so we can recommend one that works best for your needs.

The Cost of Better Security
There are a multitude of password managers available. Some offer free versions but when it comes to the security of your business, remember that you often get what you pay for. With that in mind, at Oram we recommend paying for a password manager as many don’t cost much.

Most password managers offer some sort of free trial period and range from $12 per year to upwards of $50 a month. The cost may depend on the number of devices or users the program is being employed for.

What Oram Recommends
There are so many password managers available that it can be hard to choose one. Some offer features such as photo login options (a form of multifactor authentication), phone support, and use across a wide variety of operating systems. The two that we recommend to our clients are MyGlue and LastPass.

We highly recommend MyGlue because it offers so many options for a low price. First, as a business owner, you will know who accesses what password and when. MyGlue is easy to use, functions well with multiple operating systems and allows you to share training material with your team for the program so no one is lost. Finally, you can avoid hackers by using strong passwords that are secure, keeping your business information such as the PII of employees and clients and your proprietary data safe. MyGlue also employs the highest security measures available.

If MyGlue doesn’t fit your needs, LastPass is the next best option. LastPass works on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. It offers a variety of subscription options from a single user to families, teams, and enterprises and all are quite affordable. With LastPass, you can simplify online shopping, store digital records, and share passwords and notes with others securely in addition to storing and generating passwords.

If you have lingering questions or concerns about the use of password managers, please call Oram today at (617) 933-5060 or visit us online. Our team is happy to help you select and engage a password manager that meets all of your business needs.