Cybersecurity Can't Stop During the Holidays

This Christmas, technology is everywhere. Traditionally, the holidays were a time when things slowed down for businesses and people spent time with their families and put their work on the back burner. Those days are over. Today’s professional is lucky to get a day off for Christmas; and, because of the way business works today, may be asked to do more than ever around the holidays.

Mostly, people do celebrate the holidays. According to Pew Research, between 90-and-95 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas. As a result, many businesses will not be staffed for Christmas. One element that has to be taken into consideration is cybersecurity. While a study by IBM suggests that cyberattacks don’t peak during the holidays, many organizations like to hire seasonal help to make operations run more smoothly. This opens these companies up to social engineering attacks and other malignant computer issues.

This extra risk, along with the undeniable amount of stress and reliance these computing systems have on them, make it crucial to have a full-scale cybersecurity plan in place. That’s why many organizations have consulted with IT professionals like Directive to protect their business’ network and infrastructure through diligent planning.

“It takes roughly six months to really prepare,” said Peter Tran of RSA, a computer security firm. Another expert, Demetrios Lazarikos of Blue Lava Consulting stresses testing systems to ensure their cyber security protocols are strong, “The fear is that the system will break. You test the system; you stress it; you try to anticipate the traffic.” He goes on to say that different types of attacks, including Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks create big issues, and that if there is no dedicated incident-response plan in place, a company’s IT is a sitting duck.

By having a plan to protect, test, and guard the systems your business depends on to ensure no infiltrations happen, and any that do are mitigated quickly, any company, especially one that depends on its IT to succeed (think eCommerce), can sustain themselves until business returns to normal after the holidays.

The IT support leaders at Directive understand how important cybersecurity is for the sustainability of your business, and are committed to helping Upstate New York businesses protect their networks through any type of situation. Call us at 607.433.2200 to learn more.