Small and midsized businesses may not be utilizing the best security systems to fully counter modern cyber threats.
Glen Carll, senior cyber security analyst at Symantec, says many larger corporations are now using cloud-based cyber security – and the smaller businesses should consider following suit.
“Things are going ‘cloud’ very quickly. Over the past five years, momentum has picked up. It’s a big thing, really big. Big financial companies are getting rid of their in-house stuff and moving into the cloud. It’s a big paradigm shift,” Carll says.
Security Software as a Service (what he calls SSaaS) is becoming more prevalent, and it’s something SMBs should be looking to invest in, he says.
“So now all these different security features, which used to all be in-house, are now becoming SSaaS out there. That’s the big shift. What a lot of the small businesses miss out on is what some of these services can do for them.”
Want to learn about small and midsized business cloud-based cyber protection? Access a free Symantec and Travelers webinar here!
The four products Carll says are “imperative” for small businesses, in terms of cloud-based cyber security, are:
Anti-virus: “This has gone far beyond what the old anti-virus was. In the cloud there are all kinds of offerings and all kinds of features that it [anti-virus] couldn’t do before, to protect you. There’s artificial intelligence and machine learning being applied to these things. All of [for example] Symantec’s millions of endpoints … are feeding into a global intelligence network that these services are plugged into. It’s significantly more powerful than it ever was before.”
Email gateway: “Email was the biggest attack vector out there in 2016. Ransomware [like WannaCry and Petya] are usually propagated through email. These are why email is a big threat. What helps people out a lot … is this gateway – all of your email is coming through that and it’s being scanned for advanced threats. It’s doing things like reverse-link look-ups, so if there’s a link in an email it will look that up in real time, see if it’s a real link, and stop it if it’s something nefarious. It will stop a lot of these phishing attacks.”
Web filtering gateway: “Every single week there’s millions of websites and domains and IP address that come up on the internet, only for one purpose: to spam and attack people. Well if you have a global intelligence network that sees those types of things [in the cloud] it’s going to block those right away and stop all of that stuff from getting to your system.”
Multi-factor authentication: “[About two-thirds] of all identity breaches are because of an easy password, a default password, or a weak password. So having multi-factor is quite important. A cloud-based multi-factor would allow you to hook everything in through this one system and then you can have your people authenticating off one system instead of several.”
Want to learn about small and midsized business cloud-based cyber protection? Access a free Symantec and Travelers webinar here!
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