Is Your South Florida IT Services Company Secure?
Finding the right IT services company can be a long and tedious process—not only do you have to be able to trust that they can keep you secure, but you have to know they’re secure too! Have you asked your South Florida IT services company the right questions about their cybersecurity capabilities?
So you’ve found an IT company that you want to work with. Are you sure they’re going to deliver the cybersecurity capabilities you need?
While it’s certainly frustrating to have to do some homework before you sign an agreement, it’s vital that you make sure all your needs will be addressed before you make it official.
This is especially important when it comes to your cybersecurity…
9 Questions You Need To Ask About Your South Florida IT Services Company Cybersecurity
- Do You Use Multi-factor Authentication? MFA should be required for access to each and every one of their monitoring and management tools.
- Do You Have A Security Operations Center? Any MSP taking their security seriously will have invested in a Security Information and Event Manager (SIEM). They should also have their systems monitored by an independent third-party 24×7 Security Operations Center (SOC). If they aren’t doing either of these, they aren’t serious about cybersecurity.
- What Is Your Disaster Recovery Plan? Your MSP should follow a carefully developed disaster recovery plan to ensure downtime with their systems won’t affect clients like you. Want to see their plan? It should just be a matter of asking.
- Do You Perform Penetration Testing? They should undergo annual penetration testing to determine whether any gaps have developed in their cybersecurity posture, and remediate them as needed.
- Do You Follow Best Practices For Cybersecurity Guidance? There’s no need for security practices and policies to be unique—NIST’s Cybersecurity Framework provides a comprehensive set of cybersecurity best practices:
- Application whitelisting
- Patch applications
- Configure Microsoft Office macro settings
- User application hardening
- Restrict administrative privileges
- Patch operating systems
- Multi-factor authentication
- Daily backups
- Does your IT company follow these recommendations? It’s a good idea to find out for sure.
- Are You Keeping My Data Safe From Unwanted Access At Your Location? An important part of any IT service is proper digital security. To ensure your data is safe from cybercriminals, the right MSP will utilize comprehensive IT security measures, including:
- Firewall settings
- Intrusion detection
- Intrusion prevention
- Encryption at the file level
- Are You Monitoring Your Network? Network monitoring is a critical part of IT security, especially given any network vulnerabilities that can disrupt your network. Whereas most solutions have the provider monitoring every area of your system, you’ll want to ask them if they also cover…
- Mobile devices
- Virtual machines
- Remote users
- Are You Training Your Staff To Spot Dangerous Emails? MSP’s are some of the most highly targeted businesses for phishing attacks. Phishing is a hacking technique that “fishes” for victims by sending them deceptive emails. Virtually anyone on the internet has seen a phishing attack. Phishing attacks are mass emails that request confidential information or credentials under pretenses, link to malicious websites or include malware as an attachment. With only a surprisingly small amount of information, cybercriminals can convincingly pose as business members and superiors in order to persuade employees to give them money, data or crucial information.
- How Do You Keep Your Data Backed Up? Data loss is a reality in the modern business world, which is why a viable data backup solution is so important. Find out how your IT company handles backups—if the provider does use the cloud, you’ll want to know:
- How secure is the cloud backup solution?
- Is the backup hosted on a public or private cloud server?
- Is the backup encrypted?
- If it’s a public cloud, will they consider using a private cloud for your backups?
If your data won’t get backed up in the cloud, where are the backups getting stored?
The question is: are you sure your MSP shows the same commitment to their cybersecurity? Would they even tell you if you asked?
Finding The Right IT Company For You
Selecting a company to maintain your technology is one of the most important decisions you can make for your business. You must find the most competent and reliable IT support provider in your area.
If you don’t get the answers you’re looking for, then start a conversation with the 4it team.
We can show you exactly how we manage both ours and our client’s IT systems and cybersecurity.
Don’t just pick a company off the Internet because they’re the closest one to you. Do your research to find out if they are truly qualified to protect your data and meet your organization’s unique IT needs.
