The Fight Against Ransomware

When ConvergeOne held a Ransomware Readiness event for public sector customers, it was well-attended, with a large number of representatives from our manufacturer partners and K-12, Higher Education, and City customers. There was nothing in the event to entice the folks to sign up and attend, like say a golf outing, a basketball game in the stadium, or lunch/dinner at a high-end restaurant. It was simply in our offices in Ontario, CA.

Hackers have upped the ante. Throughout 2021, cyber criminals grew more sophisticated, more organized, and more aggressive, using advanced techniques and cooperation among hacker groups to drive an unprecedented number of attacks. All told, the cost may tally an estimated $6 trillion in losses just this year, according to Cyber Security Ventures.

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?

Maintaining an optimized, healthy, and modern IT infrastructure is crucial for the survival of any business. ConvergeOne Managed Services, powered by OnGuard, allows IT staff to rest easy knowing that a highly-skilled team of engineers leveraging an industry-leading management platform are watching over their customer’s environment. OnGuard has been developed by ConvergeOne from real-world engineering insights and decades of experience managing client infrastructures.

When you hear the term “machine learning,” do you think to yourself, “How does machine learning really work?” Well, machine learning uses historical data, and what I mean by this is past data. This data could be from databases, Hadoop systems, CSV format, or streaming data from a social media website.

Machine learning is changing the way the world thinks and operates. Let’s face it, when the words “Machine Learning Algorithm” present themselves in a room full of peers, everyone takes a deep breath. Some are confused by the thought of math; others are thinking, “Oh no, which algorithm do we use for this problem?”

Over the years, we have seen a shift from the concept of traditional IT, where a relational database was used for everything, to the public cloud. As the rate of generation and the demand for data continues to grow at an exponential rate, many businesses now face the challenge of not knowing how to cope with the rapid changes while having so much data at their disposal. Users that once dealt with Gigabytes (GBs) of data find themselves now having to learn how to work with Petabytes (PBs). This goes to show that in order for businesses to continue to excel, they need to remain proactive and evolve along with the ever-changing world of technology.

Since its launch in 2010, Microsoft Azure has gained popularity and trust with customers on a global scale. Azure is a public cloud offering that provides solutions for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). However, as with any cloud provider, there are concerns around security and breach issues (i.e., how safe is my data?), as the solutions are hosted in a cloud service provider (CSP) data center.

I can remember the moment clearly: I was in an early-morning meeting with several of my employees. Several minutes into the meeting, my mobile phone came to life with notifications and a call. Shortly after answering, there was a knock at the door. Almost instantly, I did not feel so well; I knew this couldn’t be good. As if it were rehearsed for stereo effect, I heard the words no one ever wants to hear: “I think we’ve been hacked.” My first response was, “Not possible!” Turns out, it was very possible and very much a reality. To be fully transparent, I thought my life and professional career were over in that moment; 25 years down the drain just like that! I took the cyberattack very personal.

As an Executive Director at one of the largest school districts in my state, I had officially become the next victim of ransomware.

Since the shift from the concept of traditional IT to the public cloud, there have been many new security services and cloud-native tools being implemented across all vertical industries to protect and govern the customer cloud environment. Cloud computing is evolving at an ever-increasing rate of change, but regulations and technology have not been keeping the same pace. Businesses trust the AWS cloud to secure their infrastructure so they can grow and evolve by accelerating innovation.