Are you are looking for a highly responsive IT services firm in the New Jersey/New York area, that is easy to work with, responds fast, and actually gets what the term ‘customer service’ means? If so, then you’ve come to the right place. At Panurgy, we are proud to offer an absolute 100% satisfaction guarantee. What does this mean for you? It means going above and beyond the line of duty, no matter the circumstances. We encourage you to read one of our previous posts to get a feel about what our clients are saying about Panurgy. But here’s a hint: people love to work with us. We are the experts in connecting small to medium sized businesses with more than just a run-of-the-mill managed IT services company. One of our mantras is “No square pegs in round holes.” What that means for you is that we have a wide variety of IT management services, from Panurgy Total Support (which gives you 24 x 7 monitoring, server administration, managed firewall, end user help desk, and more), to our Co-Managed IT Solution (where you can customize which services you want to outsource a la carte, being able to choose from managed security, managed backup/BCDR, 24 x 7 monitoring, help desk, and other options that can help increase security and lower overhead). Whatever your needs may be, we have IT cloud solutions and data protection solutions for you.
Data Breach
Speaking of security, today’s post is going to be centered around educating our readers about what to do if there is a security breach at your company. If you are already working with us at Panurgy, we have you covered with our advanced data protection solution. But if you aren’t, this post might really help open your eyes and cover your backside, whether you decide to work with Panurgy in the future or not!
Identify The Breach
It’s pretty difficult to address a data breach without knowing it has taken place in the first place. This may seem fairly obvious, but at the same time the main problem for many companies who have experienced a situation like this is that there aren’t any red flashing lights that tell you “a hack has occurred.” Oftentimes, a business will learn that it has been hacked months after the initial breach has occurred. They might not even identify it themselves either, but are typically informed by business partners, banks, or even the media. There are a few tips that will, ahem, tip you off to a potential data breach. Namely, a slow computer response time, spammy emails being sent from your account, websites asking for your credentials, or pop-up windows that you can’t close, are all examples that we have seen over the years of a potential data breach.
Don’t Waste Any Time
Once you’ve become aware of the issue and diagnosed the problem, address the breach as soon as humanly possible. Try to determine which server or servers have been hacked. Do two things at this point. The first is to create a disk image of those servers for the purposes of preserving their state. This could be very important from a liability standpoint, but we will discuss that more in later posts. The second thing you must do is to implement some sort of containment strategy with the affected servers, to ensure that the plague doesn’t spread to any ‘healthy’ servers. Ideally, you’ll have a data protection plan already in place for reference. But if you don’t, consider Panurgy to fill that need for you!
Determine Who Needs To Be Informed
If your breach has the chance to be a criminal case, a preliminary step may be to contact the appropriate law-enforcement authorities in your region. Being as communicative as possible with law-enforcement can only behoove you down the road, so collaborate with the police early and often. In some industries, such as financial service companies, there are legal requirements for reporting a data breach within a certain period of time. This post is meant to be helpful, but is by no means exhaustive. So take the time to educate yourself beyond this article, for the sake of your business.
Whether you decide to involve the authorities, a third-party network security investigation unit, or choose to handle your data breach in-house, you’ll need to form a ‘task force’ of some kind to give special attention to the emergency. Even if you do end up involving third parties to better solve the issue, you’ll need to have a task force in order to communicate with them and anyone else who needs to be updated on the task’s progress.
A Panurgy Client’s Experience With Total Data Protection
“Throughout Superstorm Sandy they kept us up and running and have established a rock solid disaster recovery plan for our network. From the sales team right up to the owners they are available when I need them. They always work to be part of the solution and not the problem. Throughout Superstorm Sandy they kept us up and running and have established a rock solid disaster recovery plan for our network. During Superstorm Sandy, Panurgy remained operational and assisted SJP in keeping our network up and running along with our backup site…without issue. We have been working with Panurgy for 14 years, they have always taken a positive attitude to resolve our problems.”
Gary Oravsky, Regional Property Manager – SJP Properties
Learn From Your Mistakes
So we skipped the hard part, which is implementing a solution and testing to ensure that the fix is functional and comprehensive. There are so many variables in play when it comes to email protection, spam protection, and overall network security, that it is impossible to speak to every possible situation our readers may encounter. With that said, once the fire has been put out and the dust has settled, this could be a great time to evaluate your company and staff performance in response to the breach. We recommend not being too critical because mistakes do happen, especially if this is unfamiliar territory. So be as constructive as possible; don’t use it as an opportunity to lay blame or vent unnecessarily on a staff member.
The worst mistake you can make in this situation is to not learn from your mistakes. An important question that you can ask yourself would be, “Is my company capable of implementing and executing the data protection solution that is necessary to keep my business safe?” If not, we urge you to consider us at Panurgy, the industry leading data protection company for small and medium-sized businesses. Our Total Data Protection service can bring up all of your protected servers in our cloud from your latest backup within 2 hours. This will restore services such as email, and provide you total access to all of your servers and data. We can restore servers in under 30 minutes, and recover a deleted file in a matter of minutes. Most importantly, our backup solution guarantees continued operation of the network, even in the event of a failed server.
At the end of the day, protecting your company’s data needs to be your chief concern. Cybercrime is at an all-time high, and hackers develop new techniques every day. Download our free report to determine your network risks. We are committed to helping protect our customers, and let you focus on what you do well; growing your business.
