’22 in the Rearview

Here are some highlights of what’s been covered in this space in the year gone bye-bye.

Bryley at Thirty-Five

This was the second year under Garin Livingstone’s leadership. Garin has set Bryley’s trajectory: “to make the complexities of networking and security easier for clients to understand. Without the give-and-take of good communication, it’s easy to miss information that might make network management better for our clients.” We prepared a look back at the past thirty-five. And articulated Bryley’s aim for the future: to guide its clients securely through fast-changing tech to secure and advance their organizations.

Bryley Systems Achieves Worldwide MSP 501 Designation

For the 8th time Bryley has been ranked among the top in its industry in the MSP 501, an IT industry signifier that recognizes the highest operational efficiency and business models. The award is based on a sixty-point audit.

Bryley Again Ranks Among Top IT Service Providers

Bryley was again ranked among Central Massachusetts’ top ten IT Service Providers in an annual report published by the Worcester Business Journal. And if you pull out the non-locally-owned franchises and chains from that list, Bryley’s higher than top ten. Bryley continues to grow as more businesses come to trust its approach that results in network reliability.

Corridor 9/495 Business Expo

It was good to have some sense of normalcy return on April 6 at the Corridor 9/495 Chamber’s Open for Business Expo at the Doubletree Conference Center in Westboro, Mass.

Tom Barnes was promoted to Manager of Client Services

Tom Barnes was promoted to Manager of Client Services. Vice President of Client Services Anna Darlagiannis-Livingstone said of Tom: “Tom’s successes before Bryley, led to us hiring him almost three years ago. And since he’s been here, his work making things better for our clients and contributing to the efficient running of the company are some of the reasons Tom is now managing Bryley Client Services. Also, Tom’s a good guy that clients feel comfortable working with.”

Up Times’ Greatest Information

Bryley Information and Tips newsletter, in continuous monthly publication since 2000, was renamed Up Times by Bryley to emphasize Bryley’s role in your business’ continuity. When we say business continuity, we’re referring to the planning and process by which your organization maintains its operations, not severely disrupted by a disaster or other unwanted incident. Here are some of Bryley’s most popular stories from 2022:

• A bike is resting on a lamppost without a lock. Is the bike at risk of being stolen? To answer that, you’d need to find out: Is the bike valuable? Is it in desirable condition? Who would want the bike? What’s the crime rate by the lamppost? Are people around? Is it daytime? Is there a security camera? An unlocked bike is not a risk, but, in the words of cybersecurity, a vulnerability that might be exploited …
• “Only two other cars had Positraction … and enough power to make these marks” –Mona Lisa Vito, My Cousin Vinny An example from fiction of authenticating using multiple factors. In other words by using MFA each criterion brings you closer to the truth …
• “In the zero-trust model, every network and every user are considered hostile,” said Bryley engineer Myk Dinis. And Windows 11 offers new and familiar ways to achieve zero trust …
• Compliance (aka YUCK) is laws, regulations, contracts and insurance policy terms. Failure to adhere leads to penalties, lawsuits, investigations and the chance insurance won’t cover your claims. YUCK. But by making nice with compliance, you can avoid fines and penalties, improve operational safety, cut your risk of cyber-attack, improve public relations, prevent attrition of clients …
• Is your IT staff prioritizing: ‘my email’s down,’ ‘I can’t print,’ ‘I lost a file?’ If so, by dealing with the urgent, they’ve traded away the time for doing the important, proactive work of IT – building and maintaining your secure network to advance your goals …
• Working data-sets are not fixed. They change, grow and shrink and experience events (like component failures and breaches). So you need to have plans, policies and trained people in place to ensure your backup is ready to restore at any time …

And Up Times’ Greatest Tips

And the spirit of educational content lives on in covering a variety of topics related to business continuity. Some favorite mixtape section stories from 2022 include:

• darkreading.com‘s Every Company Should Do These 5 Things contains the often-overlooked step of cataloging all applications and inter-application dependencies and what to do with the information once that’s completed …
• infoworld.com According to Charles Simon, artificial intelligence is better described as a statistical method: AI analyzes data sets to identify patterns to make recommendations …
• pushkin.fm (Car Show! Season 1, May 18) The current ultimate driving machine is in fact a technological simulation of BMW’s previous heights. Is this kind of approach the best way forward?
• techrepublic.com Top 5 Reasons Not to Use SMS for Multi-Factor Authentication SMS text messages are better than no multifactor authentication, but you can do better …
• pcmag.com With data being sold and shared and breaches happening regularly, why give your real email addresses to merchants, websites, and other contacts?
• darkreading.com This one’s about building a security culture that allows for user mistakes: A classic, and particularly high-stakes, example is a medical error, where someone gives a patient the wrong medication because the labels are too similar or the vial is stored in the wrong spot. This is usually what people mean when they say “user error.” But we can look at this type of error as a design error, rather than a user error, and start to learn how to head them off …

Catch you on the Flip Side!

That went by fast, huh? We are grateful for the trust you put in us in 2022, whether that means just reading Up Times or if Bryley manages your network. None of us here takes our role lightly in providing you with the resources for network dependability. Hello 2023. Let’s do this!