iVenture cybersecurity experts share tips and secrets to protect your business from scammers, hackers, and other malicious characters.
Key Takeaways:
- Run regular cybersecurity training for your workers
- Have clear processes that cover access, transfer, and backups of your business data
- Make sure you have a team with the expertise to manage your IT the right way
- iVenture’s customer service focuses on fast and in-depth responses
In the next 40 seconds, at least one business will fall victim to a cyberattack. What if that business is yours? Are your security systems robust enough to ward off such cyberattacks? How effective are your governance, risk, and compliance management?
One attack can lead to significant data loss, financial loss, legal liability, reputation damage, and, ultimately, the collapse of your business. Besides, you need strong systems to pass audits for cybersecurity insurance and to satisfy compliance requirements.
To get your business’s cybersecurity systems set up correctly, you need expert advice. We spoke to iVenture’s cybersecurity experts Adam Ward and Vincent Chicerelli to understand how they help businesses secure their systems and pass cybersecurity audits.
The 6 most common security questions our customers’ CTOs have
Our experts delved into the common customer service tickets they receive and how they help their clients.
- Cyber security insurance questionnaires and assessments on IT security practices
Adam: A lot of the questions we field have to do with assessments and questionnaires on our clients’ IT systems. These questions usually cover IT in general, but they also drill down to security practices around IT systems, especially endpoint threat detection and response (EDR and MDR).
Because we manage our client’s IT systems, we’re able to help them pass these audits with ease. We prep them with best practices to make sure they score high marks on any audits to get cybersecurity insurance or to satisfy compliance regulations.
- Teaching users IT awareness
Vincent: Hackers and scammers know that their easiest prey is people who are not trained. People often get complacent when there hasn’t been an attack in a long time. Also, cyberattacks are evolving, so you need to bring your team up to speed with the latest trends.
Adam: Your greatest win comes from teaching your employees to stop cybersecurity attacks. You can bundle all kinds of high-tech tools, but if you’re not teaching your users how to use them and how to spot attacks, you won’t make gains.
Our goal is security for clients, so we provide white-label security awareness training that covers a wide range of topics, including:
- How to identify possible attacks within an email
- How to thwart attacks
Vincent: We also run intentional phishing tests using Nova 4 to see who’s failing and what training is needed. Nova4 creates an environment where it’s safe to fail, and, when employees fail, we take them through remediation training.
- Permissions and privileges
Vincent: From a security perspective, a lot of the security issues we see are related to permission-sharing setups. For example, a business may have a file-share that’s only intended for their finance department, but there are people in other departments who can see it with little effort. When we face issues like this, we do our due diligence and create a project plan to resolve them.
Adam: We use a trusted client resource to figure out who should be in “privileged groups,” so we don’t disrupt their processes or create new problems.
- Encrypted email
Adam: If our clients are going to send personally identifiable information (PII) or sensitive data through email, we ensure that they have their encrypted email systems set up correctly.
Vincent: We make sure you’re using the tools and features you pay for to the greatest degree. Security systems come with a lot of functions that some businesses don’t know about and don’t take full advantage of.
- Who can access your environments externally?
Adam: When we get access to a client’s systems, one of the first things we look at is their external access: What is allowed? How is it set up now? How can it be better? We want to see what’s out there. There’s been a number of times that things are opened for a temporary person and left open for a lot of insecure protocols.
Vincent: Sometimes you have someone who’s managing the IT open up a hole so they can use it remotely, only to make it vulnerable to others. It could also be a case of an employee having some kind of cybersecurity infection in their own home that can ultimately affect your business systems.
Also, if you’re a remote business, it’s essential to have an IT partner that can guide you through the right processes and systems to ensure you don’t open the floodgates.
- Business continuity and backups
Adam: Having your data in different geographical locations gives you something to fall back on in case of cybersecurity issues. All our customers have their backup in two places: One in our iVenture vault and a second copy on our private cloud, which is out of state.
What makes iVenture stand out?
One of iVenture biggest differentiators is our excellent customer service. Instead of adding to a client’s woes and confusion, iVenture’s helpdesk focuses on listening to the client’s concerns and providing helpful and timely solutions.
Adam: We pride ourselves on providing customers with fast and responsive customer support. We also ensure that problems we fix don’t happen again. For example, if you call because you can’t connect to a printer, we don’t only fix it, we find out where the problem came from and how to make sure you don’t have to submit a ticket for it again.
Vince: When people get in touch for IT support, they’re already having a bad experience. That’s why our helpdesk is full of people who have a service heart and are great at helping people.
We’re ready to help
If you’re not sure that your cybersecurity systems are strong enough to withstand attacks, or you need an audit to make sure your pass compliance tests and insurance assessments, we’re here to help. We offer the following cybersecurity and compliance services:
- Compliance and governance
- Help meeting CMMC, HIPAA, NIST, SOC, ISO, etc.
- Essential protection for your tech (security patches, anti-virus, anti-spam, and web security)
- Support for identity management – cloud, two-factor, and secure access
- Event monitoring/management
- Firewall management
With over 140 technical staff and over 200 technical certifications, we have the expertise and heart to help manage your IT systems and address any cybersecurity concerns. Contact us to see how we can help secure your business.
