IntelliTeK’s partner, Watchguard Technologies, have recently released the results of a survey which reveals what managed IT companies in Sydney and nationwide reveal as their top threats to customers, as well as their customers’ ability to manage security alerts and overall understanding of the firewall market.
What threats do managed IT services firms think customers are most concerned about?
- 83% of managed IT support providers believe that ransomware will be their customers’ largest concern this year.
- 16% believe the majority of their customers would pay a cyber ransom.
- 65% believe at least some of their customers would pay.
As customers try to address increasing security concerns, do managed IT providers think they understand the difference between UTM and NGFW?
- 63% do not think the majority of their customers understand the difference between Unified Threat Management (UTM) appliances and Next Generation Firewalls (NGFW).
- Nearly 80% think their customers are not overly concerned about the difference between the two appliance categories at all – and only want to know that their business is protected by the latest threat prevention solutions.
It’s a game of cat and mouse – hackers are obviously getting smarter and smarter, their victims are unknowingly clicking on what appears to be trustworthy legitimate emails. As such it’s near impossible to filter out these emails from the IT side – same logo, same text, same content, same message, same links (which later divert to ransomware downloading sites). Managed IT support firms are often left picking up the pieces. Victims often just pay up to keep things simple and get moving again – but there’s no 100% guarantee that they will get off scott free, as some attacks are often embedded into the system to attack again later on.
Periodic backups have never been so important – in case of an attack one can carry on where they left off. Some firms do daily backups and even at regular hourly intervals. Best be safe than sorry. Hard backups and backups to cloud are a must and should be default for any managed IT company.