Behind the Scenes of the New York Small Business Expo with Protected Harbor

Protected Harbor excels at Small Business Expo 2022

Small businesses know that the road to success can be a tough one. Finding reliable, affordable services and resources can be challenging too.

To help them get through the rough spots and reach the business expansion goal, businesses of all sizes should participate in a Small Business Expo like this. This free event is held at New York Hilton Midtown, Americas Hall, packed with helpful resources for business owners. Protected Harbor at Booth 3524 is giving away all the industry secrets IT companies don’t want you to know. Learn how to pick the right provider for your company, the best questions to ask, and what tech trends are helping businesses grow in 2022.

Booth 3524 is a one-stop-shop for all your IT needs. Our experts can help you select the right cloud, virtual, data center, security, and network technologies to meet your company’s needs. The best way to choose the right technology for your company is to speak with an expert and narrow down your choices. Ask about the benefits and drawbacks of each technology and which one best fits your needs.

Also, we are giving away free t-shirts, Apple AirPod Pro’s, Apple MagSafe Wireless Portable Battery Pack, and Apple Watches. So what are you waiting for? Come win!

Top 5 Questions every CEO must ask their IT team

CEOs and company executives are ultimately accountable for safeguarding their organization’s long-term security, which helps mitigate cyber risks. As executives become more aware of risk and security management, they ask increasingly nuanced and complicated leaders questions. At the board level, interest in security and risk management (SRM) is at an all-time high. In Gartner’s security and risk survey in 2019, four out of five respondents stated that security risk influences board decisions.

The Gartner research assists security and risk management leaders analyze five types of questions that they should be prepared to answer at any executive or board-level meeting. Here are those questions.

• The Trade-Off Question
• The Landscape Question
• The Risk Question
• The Performance Question
• The Incident Question
• Decipher Complex Board Questions

Let’s discuss each of these in detail.

1. The Trade-Off Question_ Are we 100% secure? 

The trade-off question is that the security and management risk leaders struggle greatly. The question “Are we secure?” needs improvising and is generally asked by the executives who are uneducated and unaware of the impact of security risks on the business. It is impossible to prohibit 100% of the incidents in this scenario. The CISO’s responsibility is to help identify and evaluate the potential risks for an organization and allocate resources to manage them.

According to Gartner’s report, a security and risk management leader, in response to this question, might say, “It is impossible to remove all resources of the information risk considering the evolving nature of the cyber threat landscape. My responsibility is to work with other aspects of the business to execute controls for managing security risks that can prevent us from improving operational efficiency and brand image. There is no such thing as ‘perfect protection’ in security. We have to reassess continually how much risk is appropriate as the business grows. We aim to develop a sustainable program to balance the requirements to protect against the needs to run a business”.

2. The Landscape Question_ How bad is it out there?

Most executives want to know their security compared to peer organizations. They read threat reports and blogs, listen to the broadcast, and even are forced by the regulation to understand such things. Gartner recognizes the need to discuss this landscape. Leaders need to avoid trying to quantify risks and attach specific budget figures to the mitigation cost depending on something external. Moreover, when benchmarks give some material for conversation, they must be a negligible factor in the decision-making process.

Here are some responses that security and risk management leaders can give while discussing the broader security landscape.

3. The Risk Question_ Do we know what our risks are?

A risk outside the tolerance needs an antidote to bring it within tolerance. It does not require dramatic changes in a short time, so beware of overreacting. The Gartner report presents a way to defend the risk management decision, and you can change it according to your organization’s risk tolerance.

One of the most common issues encountered in the report is that the evaluations are subjective and depend on flawed methodology. Security leaders must have evidence to support the evaluation, even when they are not called to present it. Another aspect that needs to be considered is whether to depict the typical outcome or the worst. For instance, most incidents in favorable outcomes are within the ability of most companies to absorb. However, there is an infrequent incident that can result in a catastrophic effect.

4. The Performance Question_ Are we appropriately allocating resources?

Security is always a moving target. The security team must demonstrate their behavior to ensure the organization stays safe. It is essential to figure out if the resources are allocated appropriately and where the money is spent. The original strategy proposal should have margins for errors concerning the deadline and the budget. As far as there are overruns within these margins, they must be noncontroversial.

There may be valid reasons even if the overruns are outside the margins. The balanced scorecard approach is a way to understand how security contributes to business performance. In this approach, the top layer defines the business aspiration, and organization performance against those aspirations is expressed using a traffic light mechanism. However, it’s not the only way. Some organizations have different types of dashboards to discuss business performance.

5. The Incident Question_ How did this happen?

An incident is unavoidable, and treatment is a blessing in disguise. Security and risk management leaders should be aware that incident details may have been tightly controlled (such as sensitivities associated with the incident). Using the fact-based approach and explaining your knowledge will eliminate the mystery and give confidence that you have control over the incident. Acknowledging the incident provides details on the business impact, outlines the flaws or gaps needed to work out, and offers a mitigation plan.

Decipher Complex Board Question

There are usually no deterministic answers to the board question, and responses are generally more about showing options for sponsorship instead of a definitive course of action. The options can vary based on the context of the discussion, the board’s maturity, the SRM leader’s communication skills, and reporting frequency. However, understanding and answering board questions require everyone to understand their roles. Therefore, the SRM leader should know that the board is interested in facilitating the business goal.  Any query that may seem immature, ignorant, or complicated has a purpose. Here’s why every executive should understand the basics of cybersecurity.

As we move further into this Digital Age, it’s important for security and risk management leaders to be at the forefront of protection. Unfortunately, there will always be new threats that emerge and risks to manage. However, there are a variety of technologies and strategies that can help reduce the number of incidents and their severity. These include: reviewing third-party vendors, dual-authorization systems, unstructured data protectors, and big data analytics. As long as companies take a proactive approach to their cybersecurity efforts, they will be prepared when potential threats arise, making the job of SRMs much easier.

Ultimately, the complexity of risk management systems makes it impractical for organizations of every size to create their own. Instead, a renowned solution like Protected Harbor is needed. One that can provide the solutions necessary to resolve your company’s unique needs, with a broad suite of capabilities and an intuitive platform that provides users with the tools needed to respond effectively when crises strike. Because we understand your business and what executives desire, we’ve been assisting several executives with their day-to-day operations. Contact us today for a free IT and cybersecurity audit, take charge of your future, and be cybersecured.

How we spent New Year 2022

While the world was busy welcoming the new year, Protected Harbor ensured that our customers were still up and running, regardless of date and time. Shortly after midnight on January 1st, 2022, our monitoring system raised an unusual condition, as emails suddenly stopped being transmitted for a client and instead started to build up. A build-up of outbound emails triggered the Application Outage Avoidance alert. Our team started the new year off doing what we love: helping businesses stay protected and productive.

What happened?

The email server was experiencing an error, stopping outbound emails from being delivered.

The Manager on duty, Fasif VP, immediately responded and found the problem was something we hadn’t experienced before. Fasif followed Protected Harbor protocols by restarting services, troubleshooting, and rebooting cluster nodes. Regardless of what he did, emails were still not being sent. Nick Solimando, our Director of Technology, was dispatched to investigate.

Nick confirmed Fasif’s concern. We had never encountered this error before. Nick walked through the standard procedure, reviewing the steps Fasif had taken to confirm the issue. Nick could not find a solution despite bypassing our reputation filter and moving emails from one node to another. Upon further investigation, Nick found other people over the internet are experiencing the same issue, indicating that there was a problem in the programming code of the server. His experience and intuition led him to disable the internal email filter, and emails began to flow again.

Eventually, he found a REDDIT thread – Exchange 2019 Anti-Malware – Bad Update? : sysadmin (reddit.com) covering the issue. One thing about the people at Protected Harbor, they are eager to learn. Technology is constantly changing, and our team needs to stay up to date. We are never egotistical enough to believe we know it all and enjoy working with the IT support and MSP community to stay on top of new trends and issues.

From beginning to end, the event took 40 minutes. Our customers were unaware of this event, nor did we receive a single support call or ticket regarding missing emails.

It’s just another day at Protected Harbor – where we solve problems others cannot.

Protected Harbor celebrated this new year by standing true to its name, protecting and delivering the customers at any cost, no matter the day and time. Customer satisfaction is the utmost priority, and this is what we strive to do.

“This is an example of events that customers are unaware of occurring but are the hallmark of the difference between other MSPs and us.  As CEO of a technical architecture company, there are the events I am most proud of.”     -Richard Luna, CEO, Protected Harbor

Closing thoughts and future plans!

We’ve all heard the saying, “Know thy customer.” It’s a simple concept that’s been around for ages. But it is also one of the most critical factors in creating a successful brand. If you know your customers—their struggles, their needs, and what they expect from you—you’ll be able to create a brand that resonates with them.

Having complete control and management of all our internal technology is our core philosophy to deliver better customer uptime, experience, durability, and responsiveness.
We refer to ourselves as the Anti-MSP since we take an opposite approach to most Managed Service Providers (MSPs). The majority of MSPs are now just reselling cloud services; they have no control over, or understanding of, the technology they are managing.
A more extreme example of this was the Office 365 attacks from 2021 when thousands of company emails were compromised due to the MSP that managed the accounts.
As the ANTI-MSP, your responsibilities are more significant.  We must respond 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, including on New Year’s Day 2022, since we control and manage our technology.

We plan to protect the customers and deliver at all costs in the future. The customer is interested in how we can help them with their IT needs, not what we offer. We need to articulate that value proposition and then deliver on it.

The good thing is that the new year brings a fresh start, and we are all ready to start something new. Switch from a reseller MSP to the experts who understand your needs. We at Protected Harbor are excited about the industry’s future and are looking forward to delighting our customers with unmatched services and solutions. Let’s get started with the new year 2022! Learn how we do this.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

WHY IS 99.99% UPTIME IMPORTANT?

Today, businesses of all sizes have grown more reliant on their technology and no business, no matter the size wants to see their systems or site offerings offline – even for a few minutes.  This is why uptime has become vital.  For many companies, uptime is not a preference, it’s a necessity.

Uptime is important because the cost and consequences of downtime can cripple a business, however, no business in any industry can guarantee absolute perfection. Even with tremendous precautions and redundancies in place, systems can fail.  Natural disasters or other mitigating factors out of our control that may require a quick re-boot can’t always be predicted or prevented.

In order to evade debilitating periods of downtime, businesses must employ the most current technologies, designed with uptime in mind, or utilize a managed service provider well versed in the latest technology and long term solutions.

It is no secret that businesses look for 99.99% uptime.  If this percentage seems unrealistic, the additional decimals make a huge difference. The reality is that .1% of downtime is an unacceptable percentage for most companies.  When businesses encounter downtime, they cannot provide services to their customers.  Customers have short memories and as a result, may be tempted to take their dollars elsewhere if they cannot get what they want in a timely manner.

Not only is losing customers disastrous, but productivity can suffer as well.  This is never a good combination.  The average cost of downtime across businesses of all sizes and all industries is around $5,600 per minute.

When a customer selects a company, they need to trust that they are working with a professional and capable organization. Not being able to access a company’s website or employees telling customers they cannot help them at the moment they called does not ensure shopper confidence. This damage can be irreversible to a business’s reputation.

Given that the consequences of downtime are so costly, it’s easy to understand why achieving near-perfect uptime is so important. In order to completely avoid all of the costs and consequences associated with downtime, businesses need to be aiming for uptime of at least 99.99%. While these consequences may seem a bit disheartening, the good news is that there are ways to avoid them. Get connected to our data center and solve your issue.

Protected Harbor helps businesses across the US address their current IT needs by building custom, cost-effective solutions.  Our unique technology experts evaluate current systems, determine the needs then design cost-effective solutions. On average, we are able to save clients up to 30% on IT costs while increasing their security, productivity and durability.  We work with many internal IT departments, freeing them up to concentrate on daily workloads while we do the heavy lifting.  www.protectedharbor.com