Entries by Lawrence Strauss

Bryley Systems’ 10th MSP 501 Award

July 3, 2024 in /by

In a worldwide industry evaluation, Bryley is one of the top IT providers

Bryley has been awarded its 10th MSP 501 designation, an annual IT industry honor acknowledging the MSP (managed service provider) industry’s highest operational efficiency and business models.

The MSP 501 award is based on a sixty-point audit to verify the fitness and stability from which independent IT providers can serve their clients with dependable IT.

The MSP 501 award translates to peace of mind for you

When a business is recognized within its industry, it’s easy to wonder what it would matter to your organization. Does it mean better service? Can Bryley meet your needs better than other MSPs? [4 min. read]

Skipping the Down Times

June 12, 2024 in /by

If employees cannot access files or applications to do their work, organizations feel the pain of lost revenue and low employee morale. It may also be felt by clients, vendors and prospects who may question the organization’s fitness.

Online calculators can help you estimate the cost of downtime for your organization. Roughly an organization with twenty-five employees and an average revenue/employee of $100/hour means a $2,500 loss per hour of downtime. If your organization has 10TB of data backed up locally, the backup might take 40 hours to be restored. That means the cost of the downtime is $2,500 x 40 = $100,000.

And this is why business continuity as we talk about it in the IT world has been so highly prized … [5 min. read]

Rylie Fuller Promoted to Senior Field Technician

June 3, 2024 in /by

Bryley Systems is proud to announce the promotion of Rylie Fuller to Senior Field Technician
According to Vice President of IT Operations Kristin Pryor, Rylie has made great progress at Bryley Systems, picking up new tasks easily and creating a niche for projects and support in Microsoft 365, Extended Detection and Response (XDR), Network Detection and Response (NDR) and SharePoint … [4 min. read]

Bottom Six

May 3, 2024 in /by

Heard of the Top Ten? The Final Four?

The Business Continuity Pyramid was built to be generally instructive about what Bryley has found to be foundational to an organization’s cybersecurity defense. The foundation of the pyramid shows these six cybersecurity recommendations:

    • Comprehensive Support Program (CSP) Basic
    • Security Updates
    • Email Protection
    • Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware
    • AI-Enabled XDR (Extended Detection and Response)
    • Assessments

These six were chosen because these items do the essential work that keeps an organization going despite the many threats every business faces.

So that begged the question, what if these six items were ignored? What might be the impact? [6 min. read]

Kristin Pryor Achieves Mimecast Certification

May 2, 2024 in /by

Achievement Brings Elite Email Security Solution to Bryley Clients

Mimecast is considered among the IT industry’s best email protection systems. With Kristin Pryor’s recent certification in Mimecast’s deployment and her knowledge about how it can be effectively integrated with Bryley’s security stack, she can advise Bryley clients when they should include Mimecast as part of their defenses … [4 min. read]

Doublecheck Those Figures

April 4, 2024 in /by

The threat posed by overconfidence

–Jeetu Patel, Cisco

Economist Daniel Kahneman’s life’s work (he died last month at 90) was to point out how irrationally we behave, including telling the Guardian that if he had a magic wand, he’d most like to correct our overconfidence.

The Titanic’s sinking may have been due to overconfidence. Investors’ ideas on moves they should make in the stock market wind up costing them 4%. And now we have the Cisco 2024 Cybersecurity Readiness Index Report. This is a double-blind survey of over 8,000 business and cybersecurity leaders. The findings show the greatest cybersecurity weakness is a disconnect between overconfidence that their business will be able to avoid a disrupting attack and their analyzed readiness for avoiding disruption. To be exact: 73% of business leaders anticipate an attack in the next two years, but a surprising 3% were shown to be prepared for such an attack … [6 min. read]

MFA Still Tops

April 2, 2024 in /by

In SonicWall’s 2024 Threat Report the Number One Attack-Deterrent Is MFA

Complex, Locked Vaults and Double Keys

How would you feel about giving your valuable documents to a bank that only had a single lock on the bank’s outside doors? One lock might put off a less-determined intruder, but I’d expect it would be pretty easy for a burglar to figure a way past just one lock. So how would you expect a bank to responsibly treat your valuables? Not only would those outer doors have locks, there should also be a built-in cement and steel vault secured to the building’s structure to withstand destructive weather, fire and thieves, the vault’s lock should be complex to resist cracking, within the vault should be locked steel boxes that usually require two keys (one that you hold and one that the bank holds and authorizes its use after you prove your identity).

What is the relative value of what people keep so securely at a bank compared with the data an organization is trusted to protect? [6 min. read]

Ever See an Ant Back Up?

March 1, 2024 in /by

And Now for Something Completely Different

In the light of summer in a forest, a colony of ants was busy. It was known as The Colony of Methodical Memory. And the colony worked hard. The ants built clever storerooms within the earth. And they meticulously copied their knowledge and wisdom onto many gathered leaves and placed these in the secure storerooms.

There was at the same time in the same wood a swarm of grasshoppers, known as The Swarm of ‘Hi There’. While the ant colony worked, the grasshoppers swayed on leaves in the sun … [5 min. read]

Look Past the Weeds

February 29, 2024 in /by

Don’t Get Lost In The Vulnerabilities

The lockdowns found me in my garden more. One of the things I learned those couple years was that I started out intently focused on the annoyance of weeds – pulling them, pouring boiling water on them when they popped up in the cracks of my driveway, generally trying to kill them. But at some point my focus shifted and I began to see the whole yard – I especially noticed where different plants thrived or failed to. I moved things around. Happy, healthy plants – including working on achieving thicker ground covers (like that sedum pictured) – look beautiful while making the conditions less hospitable to weeds.

Vulnerabilities, which includes unpatched software and misconfigured systems, can be thought of like weeds … [6 min. read]

Question Everything

January 31, 2024 in /by

A set of policies … would have identified, I believe, a pattern of activity here …

–Navy CTO Don Yeske

The US military is in the process of moving to a Zero Trust networking framework. But before they began that process in November, a Cape Cod-stationed National Guardsman leaked 350 classified documents over the course of between six and fourteen months before his detection and arrest. And Zero Trust – that enforces stringent policies or rules over permitted network activities – might have stopped the rogue airman sooner (he was serving as an IT admin without need to access those military secrets).

This type of breach is called an insider attack. Insider breaches make up 20% of all breaches. Zero Trust is useful to handle these and many of the other attacks that begin outside an organization’s network … [5 min. read]