Remote Workforce Business Continuity

Ensure your Business Continuity Plan Secures your Remote Workforce

In our last Securing Remote Workers Blog, we discussed how organizations in today’s world must adapt to changing business conditions to ensure a secure remote workforce. Another critical element for securing your remote workforce is ensuring your business continuity and disaster recovery plan includes the ability to support your remote workforce with little or no notice. An organization must be capable of sustaining normal operations due to a power outage, illness, flooding, or similar event, which makes it unsafe for employees to travel onsite. In such an event that disrupts normal business operations, an organization must be capable of rapidly transitioning to a fully remote workforce.

If you already have a business continuity plan, you should consider adding remote workforce security capabilities to your plan, such as:

  • Multifactor authentication
  • Data loss prevention (DLP)
  • Advanced Threat Protection
  • Wireless connectivity

If you do not have a business continuity plan, the Department of Homeland Security provides details on the following four steps:

  1. Conduct a business impact analysis to identify time-sensitive or critical business functions and processes and the resources that support them.
  2. Identify, document, and implement to recover essential business functions and processes.
  3. Organize a business continuity team and compile a business continuity plan to manage a business disruption.
  4. Conduct training for the business continuity team and testing and exercises to evaluate recovery strategies and the plan.

For more information you can download a summary guide here.

 

PSAP Cyber Risks to 911

CISA Report on Cyber Risks to 911: TDoS

A telephony denial of service (TDoS) attack is a specific type of DDoS attack directed towards a telephone system to bring the targeted system down. These attacks can affect anyone, including our 911 infrastructure, and may often include ransomware requests. 

As such, TDoS attacks present a unique risk to public safety communications stakeholders, including Emergency Communications Centers (ECC), Publics Safety Answering Points (PSAP), and other 911 centers. 

In response, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) developed the Cyber Risks to 911: Telephony Denial of Service fact sheet to educate the public safety community on TDoS threats. 

Specifically, the fact sheet reviews:

  • The most common TDoS attack vectors
  • Real-world TDoS incidents and impacts
  • Best practices to mitigate TDoS vulnerabilities

One of the key takeaways is for ECC/PSAPs should consider a managed service provider to address two of these migrations:

  • Implement the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework to improve cybersecurity posture
  • Conduct cybersecurity assessments, identify capability gaps and vulnerabilities, and determine appropriate cybersecurity standards

Take Action to Prevent Attacks:  Download CISA’s TDoS fact sheet to see the seven steps to prevent cyber attacks.

 

Remote Workforce

7 Critical Considerations for Firewall Performance in the Era of Secure Remote Work

All organizations in today’s world must adapt to changing business conditions to ensure a secure remote workforce. Traditional firewalls cannot scale across multiple applications required for secure telework, placing the burden on IT teams to upgrade existing firewalls. Upgrading outdated integrated firewalls and virtual private networks (VPN) solutions become critical requirements to ensure a secure remote workforce.

Organizations are investing in Next-generation Firewalls (NGFW) to provide performance and advanced capabilities required to scale to meet future demands of distributed teams. 

Below are seven key considerations to guide your NGFW evaluation. 

Download the report here.

1. IPsec VPN performance

Teleworking employees have access to sensitive company data. Protecting this against compromises requires the ability to ensure that remote employee connections to the company network are secure.

To ensure your network is secure, you need to validate that your NGFW can sustain the user connections and encrypted traffic load independent of the location of the users.

2. Threat protection performance

How well does your NGFW perform when running full threat protection? To sustain performance with complete threat protection, you need to insist on real numbers and a close reading of documented performance claims from your vendor.

3. SSL inspection capacity

A majority of enterprise network traffic is now encrypted, and bad actors are continuing to take advantage. Ensure that your NGFW SSL decryption and inspection can offset these security risks and provide predictable performance with minimal degradation in speed.

4. Price vs. performance

Many NGFW vendors increase the size of their firewalls to boost performance and increase the cost. With big leaps in disruptive firewall technology, ensure that your NGFW vendor combines price and performance with an eye to a smaller footprint

5. Credible third-party validation

No organization investing in NGFW should rely on a single vendor. Review third-party evaluations for detailed validation of various NGFW solutions.

6. Easy, single-pane-of-glass management

Security teams that have to toggle between multiple dashboards to assess vulnerabilities, respond to threats, and ensure system resiliency are not efficient. Rely on a vendor that can provide a seamless dashboard that aggregates information for efficient decision making.

7. Future-proofing

All organizations must embrace digital innovation and transformation to become more efficient and secure. Ensuring an NGFW that not only provides performance at agreeable cost and scale but can also anticipate future demands.

 

 

 

Secure Your NextGen 911 Network

Protecting America’s NextGen 911 Networks 

NextGen 911 systems allow Public Safety Answering Point (PSAPs) and public safety agencies to deliver a more responsive service that saves lives — yet these systems come with increased security risks due to their expanding cyber-attack surface.

Hackers and cybercriminals are increasingly targeting emergency response networks throughout the country. According to recent reports, more than 40 attacks in the last three years have targeted 911 dispatch centers. However, these attacks could increase as traditional 911 networks transition to NextGen 911, which enables receipt of video, text, and other data from the public over various computer networks.

Security risks include denial of service attacks, malware, ransomware, spoofing, and swatting that can overrun the service provider or infrastructure. By securing Message Session Relay Protocol (MSRP) messages, agencies can make their systems more secure and reduce the likelihood that a denial of service, malware, or other cyberattacks occurs. 

Below are the top 4 things you can do to protect against these attacks:

  1. Perform security inspections on MSRP messages before entering in these systems 
  2. Limit the rate of messages as automated solutions can generate signals much faster than a human can type, which can overwhelm NextGen 911 systems and block emergency calls
  3. Implement Denial of Service (DoS) attack prevention software
  4. Implement privileged access management (PAM) software and policies to limit the potential damage from a security breach

Cybersecurity is essential to public safety and ensuring that NextGen 911 system.  To learn more download the infographic.

 

 

Montra Solutions Ranked Among World’s Most Elite 501 Managed Service Providers

Annual MSP 501 Identifies Best-in-Class Global MSP Businesses & Leading Trends in Managed Services

ATLANTA — (August 2, 2020) — Montra Solutions has been named as one of the world’s premier managed service providers on the prestigious 2020 annual Channel Futures MSP 501 rankings.

For the 13th year running, MSPs from around the globe completed an exhaustive survey and application this spring to self-report product offerings, annual total and recurring revenues, profits, revenue mix, growth opportunities, and company and customer demographic information. Applicants are ranked on a unique methodology that weights revenue figures according to long-term health and viability; commitment to recurring revenue; and operational efficiency.

Channel Futures is pleased to name Montra Solutions as number 299 on the 2020 MSP 501 list.

“We are pleased to be included in this prestigious list. It is a great confirmation that the work our team has done to serve our customers. Montra is providing unique and much-needed software innovation to the managed service industry,” said Scott Ryan, CEO, Montra Solutions. “And we are excited to bring this innovation exclusively to our customers to manage their IT operations better.”

In the 13 years since its inception, the MSP 501 has evolved from a competitive ranking list into a vibrant group of service providers, vendors, distributors, consultants and industry analysts working together to define the growing managed service opportunity.

“For the third year running, the applicant pool for the annual MSP 501 has grown year-over-year, making this year’s list the most competitive in the survey’s history,” says Kris Blackmon, Senior Content Director at Channel Partners and Channel Futures. “The MSP 501 leveraged judgment methodology brand-new in 2020 to drill down into not just what makes a big managed service provider, but what makes a great managed service provider. The 2020 winners are truly the best examples of innovation, business acumen, and strategic savvy on the planet. We extend our heartfelt congratulations to the 2020 winners and gratitude to the thousands of MSPs that have contributed to the continuing growth and success of both the 501 and the thriving managed services sector.”

Ten MSP 501 special award winners will be recognized at the MSP 501 Awards Gala at Channel Partners Virtual: Digital Events for the Modern Channel on September 8 – 10. Nominations for these special awards, including Digital Innovator of the Year, Executive of the Year and the Newcomer Award, were included in the MSP 501 application, and all candidates were encouraged to submit for them.

The data collected by the annual MSP 501 program drives Channel Partners’s and Channel Futures’ market intelligence insights, creating robust data sets and data-based trend reports that support our editorial coverage, event programming, community and networking strategies, and educational offerings. It serves as a lynchpin to dozens of programs and initiatives.

The complete 2020 MSP 501 list is available at Channel Futures.

Background

The 2020 MSP 501 list is based on data collected by Channel Futures and its sister site, Channel Partners. Data was collected online from Mar. 1 through June 30, 2020. The MSP 501 list recognizes top managed service providers based on metrics including recurring revenue, profit margin, and other factors.

About Montra Solutions

Montra Solutions is a managed IT services provider that has developed modern software to deliver enterprise-grade services to businesses of any size. Montra simplifies the management of increasingly complex IT operations with software that better integrates and automates the security and management of modern systems and data within the cloud, at the edge, or wherever your business takes you. Montra’s innovations are enabling scalability and consolidation for the highly fragmented, multi-billion-dollar managed services industry. Montra is based in Atlanta with offices in Tampa and Seattle and customers worldwide. For more information: www.montra.io.

About Informa Tech

Channel Futures, Channel Partners Online, Channel Partners Conference & Expo and Channel Partners Evolution are part of Informa Tech, a market-leading B2B information provider with depth and specialization in the Information and Communications (ICT) Technology sector. We help drive the future by inspiring the Technology community to design, build, and run a better digital world through our market-leading research, media, training, and event brands. Every year, we welcome 7,400+ subscribers to our research, more than 3.8 million unique visitors a month to our digital communities, 18,200+ students to our training programs, and 225,000 delegates to our events.

 

MEDIA CONTACT:

Kelly Bryant
Head of Product Management and Marketing
Montra Solutions
kelly.bryant@montra.io