How to Build a Cyber-Aware Organization

While the increased risk of cyber-attacks, further fueled by the pandemic, is in the news daily, too many organizations continue to lag in their planning and preparedness. There are countless stories of entities across the business and societal landscape, from big corporations to hospitals to schools, navigating data breaches and other forms of cyber-attacks that put their organizations, employees and stakeholders at risk. Cybercriminals are always looking for their next target and their tactics are continually evolving. The question is how to keep one step ahead or, at the very least, to keep pace with best practices?

Alliance Residential Company, one of the largest multifamily housing real estate developers in the United States, needed to rebuild many of its internal corporate support departments, including the IT department, after its sale of its management division.

Believe it or not, composable architecture is a concept that’s been around for a while. There are many articles dating back to 1998 (and possibly beyond) which touch on the merits of taking this approach to designing a reliable and secure network. However, it has become all the rage in recent times due to the unpredictability brought by COVID as well as Gartner’s recommendation that organizations strive for composability. The purpose of this blog post is to help folks understand why this is important and how it relates specifically to customer experience.

Every time I meet with a customer, there are always several data center concerns that weigh heavily on their minds. For many, it’s the fear that a bad actor that will destroy, steal, or compromise data. Others worry about enduring a site failure that takes down the data center and having to failover to an alternate site, with the hope that everything shifts without a hitch while under a lot of stress. Many wonder if they can recover data in a real-time human error event. Others have a simpler question: Will my systems perform to the demands of the business?

Ransomware is currently headline news and rightly so. Technology professionals around the globe have observed recent spikes in this form of cybercrime with alarm. The sheer volume of ransomware attacks in the first six months of 2021 is said to have eclipsed the 12-month total for 2020 and show little sign of slowing.

This week at Cisco’s annual partner conference, Cisco recognized ConvergeOne with a Global Award for Customer Experience Partner of the Year for rising to market shifts and demonstrating transformative thought leadership that ensures the highest level of customer success, expertise, and dedication as customers transition to subscription and XaaS buying models.

My past several blog posts have been talking about the characteristics of a modern communications platform. We’ve talked about the technical things we need to pay attention to in order to deliver a better end-user experience. We’ve talked about the embracing of a mobile-first philosophy, the need for an 11-digit E.164 dial plan to enable better directory integration and click-to-call, the advantages of SIP signaling for endpoints, and so on. We’ve still got a few topics to talk about, but I wanted to share a personal experience I had recently that reminded me why it is so critically important to have these modernization conversations proactively as opposed to waiting until it’s too late.

I’ve been known to use quotes to inspire or strengthen my message, so here goes: “The sky is falling, the sky is falling” (The Remarkable Story of Chicken Little, 1840). Believe it or not, this Chicken Little quote has significance to businesses: If you are not ready for incidents, individuals will go into a panic and act like the sky is falling. Preventing this is the main focus of an incident response plan (IRP), which takes control of events that could cause catastrophic harm to your organization in advance so that you do not panic when they actually occur.

Customers want to be more than a number. They want companies to quickly recognize who they are, anticipate what they want, and solve their problems quickly. And they want this recognition to extend across any interaction they have with a business—whether it’s phone, email, chat, SMS, or social media.

Disasters. They can mean different things to different companies. One company might be scrambling without any sense of direction during a malware attack; another company might be as cool as a cucumber. The difference is having a plan in place and the right personnel to help fulfill it. Franz Kafka, a major figure in 20th-century literature, stated, “Better to have and not need than to need and not have.”