Much like planning a trip, when you’re looking to improve your IT environment’s security and performance, you need to know where you’re starting from. An IT Assessment will give you a snapshot of where you are and that’s the starting point for your successful upgrade journey.
JDL Technologies recently performed an IT Assessment for a U.S. retail organization. “It had been many years since they took an audit of their hardware and software,” said Sofia Hein, project manager at JDL Technologies. “The departure of a key employee prompted the audit. Between that and the rampant rise in worldwide ransomware attacks, they decided it was time to review their systems. Everything from top to bottom.”
The team began the audit with a conversation about known pain points. From there they installed a program to crawl the network, inventory their systems and uncover weaknesses. The process took about an hour. Upon completion of the inventory, the program was removed.
“We were able to tell the company’s IT director what patches were needed and recommend additional cybersecurity measures, including multi-factor authentication (MFA) and training for their staff,” said Hein. “Firewalls and anti-virus programs are necessary, too, but human error still poses a huge threat to companies.”
Cybersecurity awareness training is an essential part of cyber hygiene. One employee clicking on a single phishing email can allow cybercriminals to penetrate critical infrastructure. Mistakes like that can shut down a company and cause ripple effects throughout the entire economy.
In addition to recommending security improvements, the assessment identified areas where IT best practices, processes and procedures were not being followed. Failure to follow these can lead to weaknesses in IT security. Doing annual assessments is part of good cyber security hygiene as it helps to ensure that the processes and procedures put in place are working.
For more information about Ecessa Secure SD-WAN, IT Assessments and firewall solutions, contact us.