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Sustainability: 1000 Trees and Growing

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ReforestationBack in January of this year, we announced that Cumulus Global was expanding its sustainability program. To help offset the carbon footprint of our offices and operations, we have strengthened our partnership with Evertreen and are committed to planting 100 trees per month.

Our forest has grown to over 1,000 trees across 7 countries and 3 continents. 

Over the next 30 years, the trees we have planted to date will remove over 300 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. That is the equivalent of driving an average American car 750,000 miles. As we continue to plant, the amount of CO2 our forest cleans will continue to grow.

In addition to the climate benefits, our forest is producing food, reducing soil erosion, protecting watersheds, and providing local jobs.

As an IT firm, planting trees to offset our carbon footprint is part of an overall commitment to sustainability that includes using 100% renewable energy, reuse, and recycling.

We Can Help You Do More

One of the best ways to improve sustainability is to recycle electronic waste (e-waste). E-waste recycling has challenges, including but not limited to, finding reputable recyclers and cost.

Our Basic and Business Managed Cloud Services include lifecycle management for your computer with unlimited, no-cost, e-waste recycling.

For a small number of items, we provide a prepaid label. Just box up the items and drop them off at your local post office. If you are looking to clear the shelves or empty the closet of e-waste, we can have a recycling team show up to box, label, and ship everything for you. All for free!

As an added bonus, our IT asset disposal partners partner with Veritree to plant trees with every recycling order.

Call to Action:

For more information about our Managed Cloud Services, please contact us or schedule time with one of our Cloud Advisors. 

About the Author

Allen Falcon is the co-founder and CEO of Cumulus Global.  Allen co-founded Cumulus Global in 2006 to offer small businesses enterprise-grade email security and compliance using emerging cloud solutions. He has led the company’s growth into a managed cloud service provider with over 1,000 customers throughout North America. Starting his first business at age 12, Allen is a serial entrepreneur. He has launched strategic IT consulting, software, and service companies. An advocate for small and midsize businesses, Allen served on the board of the former Smaller Business Association of New England, local economic development committees, and industry advisory boards.

A Model for Business Resilience

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Aviate Navigate Communicate

The recent global systems outage, caused by CrowdStrike’s failed update, exposes a key flaw in how we view business resilience. When asked how we make our businesses resilient to failures, human acts or errors, disasters, and other disruptions, we tend to focus on the technologies and services we put in place to prevent/protect and restore/recover.

Business Resilience 

We define Business Resilience as your ability to get and keep your business up and running (even if it is running at a degraded level) until you can fully restore and recover.

Given the impact of the CrowdStrike failure on the airline industry, here is an aviation-themed model you can use as a guide.

Aviate

When an emergency happens in flight, the pilot’s first focus is to aviate – to ensure the plane keeps flying. If you can’t keep the plane in the air, your direction of travel does not really matter. 

The same is true for your business. If you cannot keep your business running at a minimally viable level, you can run out of time and/or money before you are able to restore and recover.

Navigate

Once the pilot knows that the plane will continue to fly, they can assess their current location and take the necessary direction and steps they need to land safely.

Once you know that you can continue to operate, even if only at a base level, you can step back and map out the potentially complex steps needed to restore, recover, and return to normal operations. You can then navigate the technical, operational, customer service, legal, and other processes needed for your safe landing.

Communicate

Once the pilot can safely navigate to a landing, they have the time and focus to communicate. Although, pilots do communicate during the aviate and navigate phases, they limit communications to only information air traffic control, ground operations, emergency responders, and others need in order to assist with the situation. Additional details and analysis come later.

The same is true for you and your business. While you are aviating and navigating, you will want and need to share necessary information with those who need it. These communications need to be “to the point” and focused. You will have the time and focus to share more detailed information as you approach, or after you make, your safe landing. You will have the time needed for review, analysis, and planning after your return to normal operations.

Call to Action:

If you are unsure or lack confidence in your business’s resilience to disruptions, we can help. Contact us or schedule time with one of our Cloud Advisors. 

About the Author

Allen Falcon is the co-founder and CEO of Cumulus Global.  Allen co-founded Cumulus Global in 2006 to offer small businesses enterprise-grade email security and compliance using emerging cloud solutions. He has led the company’s growth into a managed cloud service provider with over 1,000 customers throughout North America. Starting his first business at age 12, Allen is a serial entrepreneur. He has launched strategic IT consulting, software, and service companies. An advocate for small and midsize businesses, Allen served on the board of the former Smaller Business Association of New England, local economic development committees, and industry advisory boards.

Resilience, the CrowdStrike Failure, and the Real Impact on Your Business

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Resilience

We have not written or posted much about the CrowdStrike failure. CrowdStrike is designed and priced for large enterprises. We offer endpoint protection, detection, and response services that are better designed for the small and midsize organizations we serve. In large part, the CrowdStrike failure has not directly impacted our clients and other smaller businesses.

However, the CrowdStrike failure has, and will, indirectly impact you and your business.

Technical Impacts

The biggest technical impact will be the role of automatic updates. The CrowdStrike failure was due to a programming error in a software update that was sent and applied automatically. Customers did not have the ability to limit or test the update prior to deployment.

Going forward, expect vendors to rethink how and when they use automatic updates. What for expectations that you, the customer, should test and approve changes. This shift will transfer more of the responsibility from vendors to your IT team. If you do not have the resources to test and verify updates, you will be taking on more of the responsibility should issues arise.

If you have an IT provider or managed service provider, you may need to negotiate this additional work into your contracts.

Business Impact

The most significant impact of the CrowdStrike failure is on our understanding of “Resilience.” When we talk about endpoint protection services like CrowdStrike, backup/recovery solutions, advanced threat protections, encryption, and other services, we are talking about tools that help our businesses become and remain resilient to cyber attacks, improper user activity, disasters, and other disruptions. 

These technical solutions provide some of the “Prevent & Protect” and “Restore and Recover” components of our Security CPR model and services. With the CrowdStrike failure, a tool intended to improve resilience exposed a weakness in our resilience: what happens when your solution becomes the problem?

Our understanding of resilience needs to change. We must move away from thinking about resilience as a function of IT. Resilience is a business-level function that encompasses all aspects of your organization.

Anecdotally, we learned that during the CrowdStrike failure: 

  • Airlines in Hong Kong wrote out boarding passes by hand and kept lists in notebooks to track manifests and seating assignments.
  • Lacking computers to centrally monitor infants and non-operational security doors in a California Hospital maternity ward, nurses were held over and stationed at each infant’s bedside, and security guards were tasked with guarding doors.
  • A small distributor wrote labels, bills of lading, and customs documents by hand for thousands of shipments.

The Big Question

Answer the following question for your business:

  • Can you run your business, even if it is in a degraded mode, without one or more of your key systems? If so, for how long?

Your answer is key to understanding how resilient your business is to disruption, the potential operational and business impact of a disruption, and your ability to recover and survive.

Call to Action:

If you are unsure or lack confidence in your business’s resilience to disruptions, we can help. Contact us or schedule time with one of our Cloud Advisors. 

About the Author

Allen Falcon is the co-founder and CEO of Cumulus Global.  Allen co-founded Cumulus Global in 2006 to offer small businesses enterprise-grade email security and compliance using emerging cloud solutions. He has led the company’s growth into a managed cloud service provider with over 1,000 customers throughout North America. Starting his first business at age 12, Allen is a serial entrepreneur. He has launched strategic IT consulting, software, and service companies. An advocate for small and midsize businesses, Allen served on the board of the former Smaller Business Association of New England, local economic development committees, and industry advisory boards.

Change Management in Cyber Security

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Security, Privacy, & ComplianceCyber Security Will Change Companies

IT change management is a structured process for evaluating proposed IT system or service changes. This procedure is carried out prior to implementing the requested change on an organization’s network, reducing or eliminating network outages.

At a recent security and risk management summit, Gartner shared their views of how cyber security will change companies.  While Gartner’s predictions focus on larger enterprise, several of their observations will likely hold true for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) when it comes to change management in cyber security processes.

Here are some observations and our view of how they will impact small and midsize businesses.

Impacts of Cyber Security Change Management

Through 2023, government regulations requiring organizations to provide consumer privacy rights will cover 5 billion citizens and more than 70% of global GDP.

Privacy regulations will continue to expand as more nations pass legislation establishing privacy requirements.  Within the US, we expect more states to follow California, New York, and Massachusetts with varying levels of regulations. Along with the regulations come the potential for fines and increase civil litigation, making it vital to pursue cyber security change management. In many of the statues, the protection is afforded the customer based on the customer’s location, not the location of the business.

For SMBs, establishing and maintaining a sound change management cyber security footprint is essential. Beyond the cloud infrastructure technology tools, businesses need to educate employees and have the policies and procedures in place. These policies and procedures should define expectations for employees and for how the business will respond to an incident.

By 2025, 80% of enterprises will adopt a strategy to unify web, cloud services and private application access from a single vendor’s SSE (Security service edge) platform.

Protecting access to systems is more challenging as the proliferation of usernames and passwords continue.  As the human element can be the greatest security challenge, Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions will become the norm.

For SMBs, Single Sign-On (SSO), centralized identity/password vaults, and other tools are available and are, generally affordable.  Many SMBs current hesitate given the incremental cost per user per month. As the cost and risk of missing becomes greater, we expect SMBs will see value of Identity and Access Management solutions. These solutions will become the norm within a cyber security strategy, not an add-on.

By 2025, 60% of organizations will use cybersecurity risk as a primary determinant in conducting third-party transactions and business engagements.

With increased concern and scrutiny from customers, consumers, and regulators, businesses are under increasing pressure to monitor and protect against third-party cyber security risks.  This trend will impact SMBs in two ways.

  1. Given the prevalent use of business email addresses as identities for third party applications and services, SMBs will monitor for reported breaches. Third party breaches give cyber criminals an attack vector.
  2. Larger enterprises will see businesses in their supply chains as potential security risks. They will increasing include cyber security requirement in vendor authorization process and in contracts.

SMBs need to be ready to meet the security and risk management demands — people, process, and technology — of their customers.

By 2025, 70% of CEOs will mandate a culture of organizational resilience to survive coinciding threats from cybercrime, severe weather events, civil unrest and political instabilities.

As businesses adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic, the inability of most businesses to respond to large scale disruptions exposed flaws in traditional business continuity planning. The pandemic put a spotlight on the need for business resiliency and continuity plans for businesses that had not yet considered continuity to be a priority.  The level of planning to address the threats from cybercrime will need to be the same as the planning for other disasters and business disruptions.

For SMBs, leveraging cloud solutions will remain the most cost-effective business continuity option.  Moving systems and applications into cloud services increases security, adds redundancy, provides geographic diversity, and provides better remote access than on-premise systems.  SMBs are at greatest risk from local or regional issues. Managed cloud services … even if only a “lift and shift” of existing servers and applications … will be accepted as a cost-effective way to improve cyber security processes, security and resiliency.

Final Thoughts on Change Management in Cyber Security

We expect small and midsize businesses will need to expand and change their cyber security footprint and processes. They will need to improve resiliency.  Appropriate solutions such as cyber insurance and breach response are available and are affordable.  Businesses can meet their security, resiliency, continuity, and operational needs effectively and affordably. The inherit advantages of cloud services and solutions make this possible.

To evaluate your requirements and readiness for better security and resilience against cyber attacks and other business disruptions, contact us for a consultation, or book some time with a Cloud Advisor.  The consultation is free and without obligation.


Overconfidence in Disaster Recovery: Common and Costly

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support-liferingAs reported in CloudTech, a recent study in the UK of 250 businesses finds that 95% experienced outages or data loss in the past year, with 87% needing to go to failover systems.

There is a mismatch between expectation and reality when it comes to disaster recovery.

Of the 87% that executed a failover, 82% were confident it would go well, but 55% encountered problems. And while 69% stated outages lasting minutes would be “highly disruptive” or “catastrophic”, only 27% were able to recover all systems immediately following an outage. With 37% of respondents indicating they do not regularly test their DR capabilities, many organizations have no basis for expecting a smooth failover.

Outage Sources

While we often focus on the “big disaster” that could interrupt our businesses, 53% of the outages were to mundane system failures and 52% were due to human error (more than one response was possible). Cyber attacks and environmental issues caused 32% and 20% of the outages, respectively.

Three Things We Can Learn

  1. Comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity costs money. Running infrastructure and systems in the cloud and/or using cloud-based DR and Business Continuity solutions can help mitigate these costs.  You will, however, need to assess potential downtime and time to recover, the impact of downtime, and the cost to create the right balance for your organization.
  2. Testing your DR/Business Continuity solutions should be easy and cost-effective. Plan on testing at least twice per year.
  3. Your DR/Business continuity solution should help reinforce your overall data protection and business operations. Shifting from a “recovery”-centric strategy to one of resilience can lower costs and minimize the risks and impacts of unplanned outages.

If you want to improve your business’ resilience and lower your IT costs, contact us for a free Cloud Advisor session.

 

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Resilient and Responsive Government (Gov Tech)

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Whitepaper | Source: Government Technology — A case study of how Maryland and Wyoming used Google Workspace in response to pandemic-driven demand for more resilient and responsive government services.

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The Total Economic Impact of Google Workspace (Forrester)

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Whitepaper | Source: Forrester Consulting — A Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study, commissioned by Google, estimates that Google Workspace’s secure and collaborative environment can result in a 336% return on investment over three years.

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Webcasts

Small Business Guide to Cyber Threats, Security, and Response

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(6/15/2021) – A practical guide to cyber threats and security. We will share data that quantifies the most prevalent types of risks and will outline practical, reasonable, and affordable steps you can take to both protect your business and, should an attack succeed, respond and recover.

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