Co-Managed IT & Working from Home
We recently hosted a joint webinar with Michael DePalma, Senior Channel Development Manager for Datto, one of our business partners. Datto creates technology that helps service providers like Brightworks protect our clients from cyber threats and business downtime.
We discussed trends in co-managed IT and how the approach is helping companies and their employees working from home manage the increasingly challenging IT landscape. Here are some highlights from that webinar, which is available here.
“If we weren’t in the digital age, how would the economy have survived as well as it did without the ability to stay productive while working remotely? Now we’re seeing these opportunistic criminals saying there’s so much low-hanging fruit because we have all these folks working from their home devices or home networks.”
“Nobody knows what things will look like in 12 months, but the need for agility is always going to be there. We’re so used to this way of communicating and collaborating that people are going to continue to do that. That’s here to stay.”
“There has been a 124 percent increase in ransomware attacks. Since April 1st, there’s been a fivefold increase in cyberattacks.”
“Human nature tends to let people’s guard down. If you’re in the office and you get an email saying, ‘We’re moving some money to a new account,’ you’re probably going to walk down the hall or call the controller’s extension and say, ‘Hey, this looks a little fishy.’ When you’re working from your kitchen, you should be using the same protocols, but the numbers are showing that’s not the case.”
“There’s this false sense of security that says criminals are only going after Fortune 500 companies and big cities. That may have been the case 10 years ago, but the criminals are shifting their business model to ransomware. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. They know that you can’t operate without access to your data, so they hold it hostage. They can attach thousands of small to medium-sized businesses, knowing that a lot don’t have protocols in place, so they’ll have a higher success rate. FEMA put out a study last year that said that 60 percent of businesses that are down for a week or more never reopened their doors. It’s scary stuff and criminals know that.”
“It would be great if every company had a 100-person IT department, but as we start to move into the kind of leaner way of doing things, co-managed IT is really the model. Companies just have too many things that they have to try and stay on top of. They get sucked into a culture of firefighting, which means that they can never really move forward as an organization.”
“We looked at 1,100 small-to-medium-size and even a couple of enterprise-level businesses throughout North America to see how they manage their IT. We found 71 percent of those businesses were handling all of their IT in-house. Of the other 29 percent, 61 percent were working with an outsourced IT company in a co-managed model. Close to 30 percent of the companies using the co-managed model was not working with an outside IT person at all 12 months ago. Smaller companies are saying, ‘Hey, we don’t have enough employees to have a dedicated IT team.’ And 94 percent of the companies using co-managed IT were in the ‘satisfied’ category.”
“91 percent of all data loss and downtime comes from user error, and that’s not usually a malicious internal actor. It’s somebody not understanding what they’re not supposed to do.”
“Having a mobile device policy is critical.”
“When your internal IT team is looking at something to do with compliance, they’ve only really seen it from the perspective of your environment. We’ve seen it from the perspective of dozens upon dozens of environments. We’ve seen it go wrong, we’ve seen problems. We know what can happen. In a co-managed IT situation, you get that expertise, you get that advice and you get more than a consultant.”
Learn more about how co-managed IT can help your teams working from home by listening to the entire recording here!