On Guard or Under the Radar: How Threats Vary by Industry

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

• Not surprisingly, organizations often apply similar security protections and practices to those employed by their industry peers to safeguard what are often very comparable assets, leaving them equally vulnerable or well-protected depending upon the effectiveness of their controls.
• While cyber attackers target certain industry-specific, high-value assets such as a manufacturing company’s intellectual property (IP), many of the breaches involve the theft of less valuable resources that are more often left exposed to risk.

Just as enterprises in every industry tend to share some analogous traits in how they do or do not effectively leverage IT to advance their particular business agendas, organizations within the same vertical tend to use data security strategies similar to those their counterparts use to safeguard equivalent assets.  Thus, it is not all that surprising to see some vertically specific security breach trends that highlight gaps in industry-wide security practices.

Superstorm Sandy Reinforces the Need for Business Continuity Planning

Cindy Whelan

Summary Bullets:

• The arrival of yet another devastating storm reinforces the need for business continuity features.
• Business customers need to have a clear understanding of their carrier’s internal architecture for redundancy; they should also take secondary steps for further assurance of continuity.

In my August 28 blog, “UCaaS Can Be a Lifesaver in a Disaster,” I discussed the need for customers to have a clear understanding of their service providers’ business continuity features.  When I wrote that article, nobody had any idea that a storm on the scale of Sandy, which ravaged the Mid-Atlantic seaboard, was on the horizon.  Of course, the first and most important thing in these situations is the protection of family and loved ones.  This was a storm like nothing else in recent history in the region, leaving devastation in its wake.