Whatever Your Questions About Tech Solutions Are; SNS is the Answer!
“Why would someone want to hack a small company like mine?”
That’s the one line we hear business owners say, not knowing it came from the inside; unable to imagine their own employee deleted all their files.
That single sentence launches a majority of clients on their journey to a more secure future in business. Most business owners are uncertain about where they stand in their “Technology Department”. With buzzwords flying around like SolarWinds, Ransomware, Viruses, and Hacking, the “ostrich approach” is common, yet it is simple procedural changes that can make a massive impact to ensure disruption-free operations.
When it comes to secure technology, if you don’t know what you have, you don’t know what you need. The moment you have the slightest question about what’s covered and if it’s enough, that’s your guarantee that there’s a vulnerability, redundancy, or opportunity that SNS Technologies can address.
Owner Mike Ray shares, “It’s better to have us come in and check than to have to contact us after the disaster.” Disaster can be defined a number of ways, so our approach has been to ensure the fundamentals are covered before tackling more advanced risk such as ransomware. Whether human error, lack of knowledge, missed opportunity, loss or lack of time – what you don’t know can cost you in dollars or reputation.
Many times, business interruptions regarding technology are low tech and come from the inside of the company due to a lack of awareness. While we can rebuild computers, we can’t recreate data – when that’s gone, it’s gone. Once data has been irrevocably compromised, whatever you’ve built and cultivated for however long is simply lost. You want to engage support and solutions proactively not responsively, asking the needed questions before it’s too late.
Many think “too late” simply applies to a hardware malfunction, ransomware attack, or virus, but SNS Technologies provides the equivalent of a fully equipped in-house IT department assuring your practices, systems, and data are monitored and maintained by a local, hands-on team of professionals.
Starting with the basics, we check to certify standard and strict policies and procedures for use in people management, especially when initiating staffing changes. We develop checks and balances for knowledge and administration of who has what info and access, so no gaps are created, whether short term or in the long run. When a company we support is set to terminate an employee, we’re notified in advance and create a ticket synchronized with those processes to disable all connected profiles, including logging them out of software remotely on additional devices, so that all steps happen simultaneously.
The low-tech response to high-tech problem: Preemptively, we help you check all the boxes for added assurance that you’re ahead of the game – activating two-factor authentication via text and email, setting up a secure guest Wi-Fi, creating policies prohibiting or limiting employee use of external devices to protect your internal network, and any number of loose ends that might create weaknesses and leave your data or your brand performance exposed.
While these may seem like simple steps, we consistently see security breaches that are based on failures in each of these areas or avoided just in time by implementation. From the group that created an external Wi-Fi log-in for IRS representatives conducting a review of their finances to the local company whose former employee logged back in after termination and crippled their quick books system, for over 20 years, SNS has identified these gaps and trained its clients to mitigate these simple, fast, and devastating oversights.
We recommend and provide for that blanket vulnerability with a continuity program that takes an image of your server every 2 hours for a year, able to restore everything within a two-hour window of an occurrence or issue. It’s a process that can roll back a year’s worth of data with a triple redundancy layer – local backup, network backup, as well as a cloud-based backup in the cloud. This offers another layer of zero trust by learning everything on your computer and restoring a virtual machine with the image of your server that can entirely eliminate loss of time and income or permanent loss of data.
While some may think this would just be a speed bump between outage and restoration, without the right protection and systems in place, it could be far more serious. We had a situation where a property management employee was correctly swapping backup drives for 5 years only to find out the initial configuration was setup incorrectly, this resulted in 5 years of backups of an empty folder and their client data lost.
The glossary of coverage areas is more than most want to think about or even can, which is where our team of experts serves you and your business. Often something simple like accidentally moving a file to a lost location, saving the wrong file and losing pertinent information, or one of the most common we see is poor employee training, the low-tech value of having an audit can help you be aware of other areas such as router security. So many local businesses are using internet-provider boxes that your average 12-year-old can hack in 2022, and you probably could, too, after just a few YouTube videos.
When it comes to Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) the goal is to reduce risk, shield systems, restore function, and secure revenue. This happens by limiting or avoiding any disruptions or outages and their related consequences and negative impacts. The data center standards organization “Uptime Institute” reports that outages like these can “increasingly span multiple data centers and dictate comprehensive and ongoing resiliency reviews of all company-owned and third-party digital infrastructure.” According to their recent Global Data Center Survey on business impacts from infrastructure issues, “more than 10% of the respondents said their most recent outage resulted in $1 million-plus in direct and indirect costs.”
Just like the threats to cyber security are always increasing in ability to steal and corrupt data, SNS Technologies works from an all-encompassing and ever-expanding approach to protecting your data and tech systems. If it affects your business performance, we have systems to manage what matters and ensure everything from your fundamentals to most advance needs are covered.
We say, “If you’re wondering if you’re secure, you’re probably not.” It’s a basic test of whether or not you need IT Solutions support, but it doesn’t capture the urgency of putting those solutions in place. Especially here in the Lowcountry where there are added unpredictable factors like weather warnings – for example if a machine is left in the office during a hurricane evacuation and damage occurs, you can still function with complete restoration of data without threat or loss.
They say ignorance is bliss. We’ve seen for ourselves it’s not bliss – it’s painful, costly, and incredibly prohibitive to your goals and finances. SNS Technologies is the antithesis to one hundred percent of the tech issues you face – whether they’re plaguing you now or you’re securing against the unknowns you could (and most likely will) be facing down the road.