Cyber Insurance Continues to Skyrocket—Do You Have a Security Strategy in Place?
Cyber Insurance Continues to Skyrocket—Do You Have a Documentable Security Strategy in Place to Show You’re Prepared?
Cyber risk is a growing critical concern for organizations of all sizes and public entities globally, as we continue to rely on information technology and digital devices. But in the wake of steadily rising digital threats, cyber insurance is getting increasingly expensive—and difficult—for companies to procure.
Increasingly Difficult Security Requirements Complicate Cyber Insurance Renewal
Have you received a cyber insurance renewal notice with a shocking sticker price? With an ever-increasing number of security incidents involving data breaches, ransomware, phishing scams and more, the cyber insurance landscape has changed. It’s no longer possible to get premium discounts for implementing certain security controls—more is now required. And, without enhanced security measures, you may not get cyber insurance at all.
Threats evolve over time, meaning your security posture needs to evolve in order to not only remain operational, but also be compliant to qualify for most insurance policies.
Insurance companies are now requiring more precautionary measures than ever before due to the constant—and costly—increase of threats. Premiums are increasing and coverage is being denied even for companies that have no history of breaches or claims—cyber insurance renewal rates have increased by up to 200% over the past two years, even for companies who have not made any claims.
The average cost of a data breach has raised from a massive $3.86 million in 2020 to a staggering $4.24 million in 2022.
The Solution
With the risks of operating in an increasingly digital world, cyber insurance is essential for your business to function and remain protected in the event of an attack. Aunalytics’ Advanced Security experts have the talent and technology to audit your security and discuss precautionary measures an insurance company may want you to take before renewal. With a dedicated team, your business can avoid costly data breaches, ransomware, and get your security up to snuff.
Are you ready to assess your security before your company is the victim of a bad actor, costing you upward $4.24 million dollars? See if an audit by our security experts makes sense, and whether your insurance company has outright dictated (or hinted by their renewal questionnaires) new precautionary measures that they expect your enterprise to adopt to obtain coverage.
Aunalytics Brings Its Portfolio of Managed Services, Enterprise Cloud, and Data Cleansing Solutions to Taste of IT Conference in Ohio
Leading Data Management and Analytics Company to Join More Than 400 IT Professionals for a Day of Networking and Learning
South Bend, IN (November 15, 2022) – Aunalytics, a leading data management and analytics company delivering Insights-as-a-Service for mid-market businesses, will feature its managed services, enterprise cloud, and data cleansing portfolio at the Taste of IT Conference on November 16, 2022. The one-day event, which will be attended by more than 400 IT professionals, will be held at the Sinclair Conference Center in Dayton, Ohio.
Aunalytics provides IT and security expertise to mid-market businesses in the areas of financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and professional services. The company’s Secure Managed Services offering combines mission critical IT services leveraging zero-trust end-to-end security to ensure data is protected regardless of a user’s location. Aunalytics provides managed components that offer stability and security, and its next-generation managed services offering is powered by a data platform that provides data-driven IT answers and embedded security that focuses on people and access.
The full suite of managed IT and integrated security services empowers businesses with a complete, all-encompassing approach that includes 24/7/365 monitoring and management, a synchronized network security platform, workstation and server patching, internet protection, email filtering and security, Office 365 management and security, multi-factor authentication, data and device encryption management, and security awareness training.
The company delivers advanced security for defending against modern threats through a team of engineers and analysts with expert skills and toolsets and, in regulated industries, Aunalytics provides the additional technology and controls required to manage risk. Its team of experts is dedicated to analyzing ever-changing rules and regulations and helping users to create processes and policies for data protection and meet compliance requirements within those industries that are regulated.
Aunalytics’ Enterprise Cloud offering is comprised of infrastructure solutions that provide a highly redundant and scalable platform for hosting servers, data, analytics and applications at any performance level. With the Aunalytics® Cloud Storage and Compute solution, users are assured the highest levels of security, accessibility, expertise, scalability, and savings. Aunalytics’ data centers, located in Northern Indiana and Southwest Michigan, meet the most rigorous standards for security, weather protection, temperature and humidity controls, fire suppression and more.
As data continues to expand exponentially, the challenge of data cleansing is rapidly becoming more difficult, as well as expensive. Aunalytics’ Aunsight™ Golden Record turns siloed data from disparate systems into a single source of truth across the organization. Powered with data accuracy, the cloud-native platform cleanses data to reduce errors, and Golden Record as a Service matches and merges data together into a single source of accurate business information, giving users access to consistent, trusted data across the organization in real-time. With this self-service offering, users can unify all their data to ensure enterprise-wide consistency and better decision making.
“IT executives want practical, real-world knowledge about business changing technology and management solutions that are absolutely critical to drive their businesses forward,” said Robert Lizotte, Local Market Leader, Columbus Region, Aunalytics. “As digital transformation continues to be a high priority for many organizations, our portfolio of managed services, enterprise cloud, and data cleansing solutions provides the tools they need to accelerate their digital transformation journeys. We look forward to participating at a Taste of IT and demonstrating how Aunalytics can help IT professionals advance their business success.”
Tweet this: .@Aunalytics Brings Its Portfolio of Managed Services, Enterprise Cloud, and Data Cleansing Solutions to Taste of IT Conference in Ohio #ToIT22 #Datamanagement #Informationtechnology #Managedservices #Enterprisecloud #Datacleansing #Dataplatform #Dataintegration #Dataaccuracy #Digitaltransformation #ITsecurity #Securitytechnology
About Aunalytics
Aunalytics is a leading data management and analytics company delivering Insights-as-a-Service for mid-sized businesses and enterprises. Selected for the prestigious Inc. 5000 list for two consecutive years as one of the nation’s fastest growing companies, Aunalytics offers managed IT services and managed analytics services, private cloud services, and a private cloud-native data platform for data management and analytics. Aunalytics’ data management platform is built for universal data access, advanced analytics and AI – unifying distributed data silos into a single source of truth for highly accurate, actionable business information. Its DaybreakTM industry intelligent data mart combined with the power of the Aunalytics data platform provides industry-specific data models with built-in queries and AI for accurate mission-critical insights. To solve the talent gap that so many mid-sized businesses and enterprises located in secondary markets face, Aunalytics’ side-by-side digital transformation model provides the technical talent needed for data management and analytics success in addition to its innovative technologies and tools. To learn more contact us at +1 855-799-DATA or visit Aunalytics at https://www.aunalytics.com or on Twitter and LinkedIn.
PR Contact:
Denise Nelson
The Ventana Group for Aunalytics
(925) 858-5198
dnelson@theventanagroup.com
Don’t Ghost Your Network—Begin Your Security Maturity Journey
Is your security keeping up with the rapidly changing threat landscape? If not, your security is becoming more obsolete by the day—and more vulnerable to scary things like hackers and ransomware by the second. When a company is fully protected with the most up to date hardware, software, monitoring, and consistent patching it begins to reach security maturity.
Security maturity is a consistent state of awareness concerning your network security and can only be achieved when you:
- Have an SOC to monitor and remediate threats
- Have looped vulnerability management
- Employ active defense with security intelligence from multiple sources to protect applications, networks, servers and workstations
- Are willing to adapt your security environment to new and changing threats on a constant basis, and more.
Be Proactive
Instead of relying on a passive security model—or worse, waiting until after a companywide infection—take an active role in your company’s security. The main goal of security maturity is to avoid or reduce the number of security incidents haunting your network. It’s kind of like painting San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. As soon as the painting crew gets from one end to the other with a fresh coat of paint, it is time to start again to repaint the bridge. Security maturity requires constant action and change as your organization adapts to protect against the latest evolving threats.
We all observed remote work access change security and IT on a mass scale in 2020, and security changes continue to become more necessary as bad actors and threats become more and more dangerous to your business as it continues to grow and change—and more dangerous for your customers to do business with you.
October WSJ headlines highlight a Chicago healthcare system, one of the largest in the U.S., being the victim of ransomware that is forcing it to shut down electronic records, systems, and cancel patient appointments. It is now working with law enforcement and outside cybersecurity experts to remediate. A security maturity journey is hard to make on your own, and a good partner can ensure you are meeting the highest security standards possible. Here at Aunalytics, we include security in everything we do because we believe it is a basic building block of IT.
Find A Trusted Security Partner
Without a secure network, you cannot even begin to consider moving further into a security maturity journey. Fortunately, a partner can give you the peace of mind that you will be working with a talented security team that is watching your network 24/7/365, helping to ensure bad actors are caught and eradicated before your company is compromised.
A standard, one size fits all security solution simply doesn’t work anymore—it often leaves cracks, holes, and even chasms for hackers and cyberattacks to slip through. You can improve your journey from cybersecurity to security maturity with a trusted partner.
Click here to learn more.
Aunalytics Highlights Security Priorities as Cybersecurity Awareness Month Concludes
Company Recommends Cybersecurity Solutions to Better Protect Organizations Against High-Risk Cyber Attacks
South Bend, IN (October 28, 2022) – Aunalytics, a leading data management and analytics company delivering managed IT and data platform services for mid-sized and enterprise businesses, today highlighted top security priorities to follow when reinforcing defensive security strategies against malicious cyber threats. The guidance is provided as Cybersecurity Awareness Month comes to a close in October, after a month of focus on the subject.
According to Check Point Research (CPR), “2022 began with a massive exploitation of one of the most serious vulnerabilities on the internet, the Apache log4j, and continued with full blown cyber warfare from the Russia-Ukraine war. The second quarter of 2022 saw an all-time peak, where global cyber-attacks increased by 32%, compared to Q2 2021. The average weekly attacks per organization worldwide reached a peak of 1.2K attacks.”
In response to the rising number of attacks, Aunalytics is providing guidance and solutions to strengthen, educate and defend business IT systems and data from attack. These include having a comprehensive Vulnerability Management (VM) solution, Security Awareness Training, and beginning a Security Maturity Journey – all backed by Aunalytics’ expert cybersecurity team.
Aunalytics cybersecurity solutions experts recommend the following:
- Vulnerability Management (VM) – Replaces manual efforts to protect the network from bad actors using high quality equipment and tools that are typically limited to enterprise organizations. Without a VM solution in place, it is exceedingly difficult to find individuals who have slipped into the network. A VM solution is overseen by security professionals and discovers devices on a network, determines if they are vulnerable and fixes any underlying issues, while concurrently protecting the network as fixes are implemented.
- Security Awareness Training – Security management and training are crucial for businesses to avoid digital disasters. Security awareness training is necessary to educate employees about the digital dangers in their environment and how to properly deal with them. Aunalytics provides expert knowledge and toolsets that employees need in order to better protect the organization.
- Security Maturity Journey – If system security is not keeping up with the rapidly changing threat landscape, it will become obsolete and more vulnerable to bad actors. Security maturity means adapting and improving security as the environment changes and grows. It means taking strategic actions like deploying active defenses with the help of security intelligence from multiple sources. Businesses can evolve from a legacy security state to security maturity with the help of a trusted partner.
The growing threat of cybercrime is a risk to any organization connected to the Internet. Attacks can arrive in forms that include phishing, spear phishing, ransomware attacks, zero-day attacks, known vulnerability exploits, sensitive data breaches, brute-force attacks and more. Secure Managed Services by Aunalytics offers peace of mind in knowing that IT environments are monitored and managed at all times with the goal of eliminating the risk of data exfiltration or infrastructure downtime.
“End-to-end protection requires actions and defenses that consider the entirety of systems and software throughout an organization. It also means educating employees so they are ‘security aware’ to help reduce the number of threats that may enter through vulnerable endpoints,” said Steven Burdick, VP, Sales, Cloud & Managed Services. “Aunalytics protects organizations on their security journey, deploying a defensive cybersecurity framework that provides the technology and expertise for better security posture.”
About Aunalytics
Aunalytics is a leading data management and analytics company delivering Insights-as-a-Service for mid-sized businesses and enterprises. Selected for the prestigious Inc. 5000 list for two consecutive years as one of the nation’s fastest growing companies, Aunalytics offers managed IT services and managed analytics services, private cloud services, and a private cloud-native data platform for data management and analytics. The platform is built for universal data access, advanced analytics and AI — unifying distributed data silos into a single source of truth for highly accurate, actionable business information. Its DaybreakTM industry intelligent data mart combined with the power of the Aunalytics data platform provides industry-specific data models with built-in queries and AI for accurate mission-critical insights. To solve the talent gap that so many mid-sized businesses and enterprises located in secondary markets face, through its side-by-side digital transformation model, Aunalytics provides the technical talent needed for data management and analytics success in addition to its innovative technologies and tools. To learn more contact us at +1 855-799-DATA or visit Aunalytics at https://www.aunalytics.com or on Twitter and LinkedIn.
PR Contact:
Denise Nelson
The Ventana Group for Aunalytics
(925) 858-5198
dnelson@theventanagroup.com
Does Your Mid-Market Firm Have the Right Talent to Maximize Its Data Tech Investments?
Does Your Mid-Market Firm Have the Right Talent to Maximize Its Data Tech Investments?
Investing in digital transformation technologies can be a waste of money if your company forgets one important point. That point is, no matter how cutting edge the tech or tool may be, people are needed with specific technical expertise in order to derive true business value from these investments.
Unlike large enterprises, mid-market companies often try to find this expertise in their IT manager, hoping a jack-of-all-trades approach will take care of it. This is an unfortunate mistake, since it would require the IT manager to have unusual command over a long laundry list of duties, from data integration, ingestion, and preparation to data security, regulatory compliance, data science, and building pipelines of data ready for executive reporting from multiple cloud and on-premises environments. This is not just a tall order for a mid-market IT manager to pull off, but likely an impossible one.
To read more, please fill out the form below:
Featured Content
2022 Technology First Taste of IT Conference
2022 Technology First Taste of IT Conference
Sinclair Conference Center, Dayton, OH
Aunalytics to Attend Technology First's 2022 Taste of IT Conference as a Gold Sponsor
Aunalytics is proud to be a Gold Sponsor, and excited to join over 400 IT professionals at the Technology First Taste of IT Conference on in Dayton, Ohio. Aunalytics provides a wide variety of managed IT and security solutions, such as our Secure Managed Services offering which combines mission critical IT services leveraging zero trust end-to-end security to ensure people and data are protected regardless of location. In addition, our Advanced Security solution gives organizations access to cutting-edge technology and expertise of Aunalytics professionals to prevent and mitigate cyberattacks.
Ransomware Attacks Pose An Increasing Threat to Businesses of All Sizes: The State of Ransomware 2022
Cyberattacks are a constant threat to organizations of all sizes. To better understand how the current attack environment and track how ransomware trends have changed over time, Sophos commissioned an independent, vendor-agnostic survey of 5,600 IT professional in mid-sized organizations across 31 countries. This survey was conducted in January and early February 2022. The results highlighted the increasing threat that ransomware poses, and the increased role cyber insurance is playing in driving organizations to improve their cyber defenses.
Cyberattacks are up from last year
Ransomware attacks have increased significantly over the past year—66% of organizations surveyed were hit by an attack in 2021, up 78% from the previous year. This is due in part to the ease at which bad actors are able to deploy attacks. The Ransomware-as-a-service mode has reduced the skill level needed to attack.
Not only are attacks more prevalent, but the attacks themselves are becoming more successful and more complex. In 2021, 65% of attacks resulted in data being encrypted, up from 54% in 2020. Fifty-nine percent of organizations who experienced cyberattacks saw the complexity of the attacks increase, while 57% saw an increase in the volume of cyberattacks overall.
Data recovery rates are improving
Despite the increase in attacks within the past year, there is some good news. Almost every organization surveyed (99%) were able to get some encrypted data back—up from 96% in 2020. The top method used to restore data was backups, which was used by 73% of organization whose data was encrypted in an attack. In addition to backups, a large portion—forty-six percent—paid a ransom to have their data restored.
Unfortunately, while paying a ransom typically allows organizations to get some data back, it is less effective than in years past at restoring data. On average, organizations that paid a ransom only got back 61% of their data, down from 65% the previous year, while only 4% of those that paid the ransom got ALL their data back in 2021, down from 8% in 2020. This highlights the importance of employing multiple methods to restore data—utilizing backups in particular can improve the speed of recovery and increase the amount of data that can be recovered.
Ransom payments have increased
Not only are ransoms less effective at restoring data than in previous years, but the amount of the payments themselves have increased considerably. Between 2020 and 2021 there was a threefold increase in the proportion of victims paying ransoms totaling US$1 million or more. The percentage paying the lowest ransom amounts decreased over that same time—from one in three (34%) to one in five (21%).
The average ransom payout increased 4.8X from 2020 data, from an average of US$170K to US$812,360 in 2021. However, the average ransom amount varies greatly across industries, with manufacturing and utilities coming in at the top of this survey with an average of US$2.04M and US$2.03M, respectively, while healthcare and local/state government had the lowest average ransom payments at US$197K and US$214K, respectively.
Ransomware greatly impacts companies, both economically and operationally
Even when some of all data is able to be restored after a cyber attack, the costs of loss productivity or inability to operate at all can be substantial. Of those hit by ransomware last year, 90% said their most significant attack impacted their ability to operate, while 86% said it caused them to lose business and/or revenue. The average cost to remediate an attack in 2021 was US$1.4M, which, thankfully was down from US$1.85M in 2020. This was due in part to cyber insurance providers being better able to guide victims through an effective response more rapidly.
Although there have been improvements in total recovery time over the years, it still took, on average, one month for organizations to fully recover from the most significant attacks. Those in higher education and central/federal government had the slowest average response times, at around 2-5 months, while manufacturing and financial services were the quickest, with the majority being able to recover in one month or less.
Despite the huge economic costs of ransomware attacks, many organizations are putting their faith in defense that don’t actually prevent ransomware—only more quickly mitigate its effects. Seventy-two percent of organizations in the survey who weren’t hit by ransomware in the past year and didn’t expect to be hit in the future cited backups and cyber insurance as reasons why they don’t anticipate an attack. Neither of these elements actually prevent attacks in the first place.
Simply having security resources in place does not necessary mean that they are effective. Of those surveyed who were hit by ransomware in the last year, 64% said they had more cybersecurity budget than they need, and 24% said they had the right amount of budget. Many of these organization also said they had more headcount or the right amount of headcount (65% and 23%, respectively. This reveals that despite having ample resources—both personnel and technology—organizations will not achieve a high return on investment without a combination of the right technology and expertise to use the technology effectively.
Cyber insurance drives changes to cyber defenses
Thankfully, organizations do not have the shoulder the burden of ransomware costs all on their own. The survey found that four in five mid-sized organizations had insurance against ransomware attacks. However, 34% said there were exclusions/exceptions in their polices. Organizations that had been previous hit by ransomware attacks in the past were much more likely to have cyber insurance coverage against ransomware. However, many respondents indicated that securing coverage has changed in the past year, or gotten more difficult to obtain:
- 54% said the level of cybersecurity they need to qualify is now higher
- 47% said policies are now more complex
- 40% said fewer companies offer cyber insurance
- 37% said the process takes longer
- 34% said it is more expensive
As a result, 97% of organizations that have cyber insurance have made changes to their cyber defense to improve their cyber insurance position. 64% have implemented new technologies/services, 56% have increased staff training/education activities, and 52% have changed processes/behaviors.
Conclusion
The survey has revealed that ransomware continues to be an imminent threat for organizations of all sizes across industries. For many, choosing an experienced partner with expertise in cybersecurity not only improve their chances of getting approved for the right amount of cyber insurance coverage, but can ensure that they see an higher return on investment and improved ability to prevent and mitigate attacks in the future.
Does Your Mid-Market Firm Have the Right Talent to Maximize Its Data Tech Investments?
Does Your Mid-Market Firm Have the Right Talent to Maximize Its Data Tech Investments?
Investing in digital transformation technologies can be a waste of money if your company forgets one important point. That point is, no matter how cutting edge the tech or tool may be, people are needed with specific technical expertise in order to derive true business value from these investments.
Unlike large enterprises, mid-market companies often try to find this expertise in their IT manager, hoping a jack-of-all-trades approach will take care of it. This is an unfortunate mistake, since it would require the IT manager to have unusual command over a long laundry list of duties, from data integration, ingestion, and preparation to data security, regulatory compliance, data science, and building pipelines of data ready for executive reporting from multiple cloud and on-premises environments. This is not just a tall order for a mid-market IT manager to pull off, but likely an impossible one.
At the same time, it’s unreasonable to expect that most mid-market firms can hire an entire division of data experts—who each need to be highly compensated—in order to achieve the organization’s digital transformation goals. Even if a mid-market player could afford it—which is unlikely to make economic sense—these talent resources are scarce and in high demand.
If you’re still wondering whether your IT manager’s skill set, leveraged by your in-house IT technicians, can properly run the gamut required to achieve value from your data technology investments, consider that the person in this position would need the ability to master a wide range of skill sets, from cloud architecture, database engineering, and master data management to data quality, data profiling, and data cleansing. More specifically, your IT manager would need to take on five additional specialized roles for technical talent that are critical for achieving value from data technology investments.
These roles are:
Chief Data Officer/Chief Digital Officer
A chief data officer (CDO) is focused on—you got it—data. Most mid-market companies understandably don’t have a CDO, which means they don’t have anyone who assures regulatory compliance for data handling while managing and exploiting information assets, reducing uncertainty and risk, and applying data and analytics to drive cost optimization and revenue objectives. For IT managers to fulfill a CDO role, they’d have to be equipped to bring a global perspective to company data, help their organization gain competitive advantage over peers, and manage data and analytics. They’d also need the ability to secure data, transform it into valuable business information, lead digital transformation initiatives, and use data for growth and operational efficiency.
Cloud Engineer
The primary job of a cloud engineer is to keep cloud data centers operational and secure for ecosystem users to be able to store and access their data. Cloud engineers are experts in minimizing downtime, managing access to data, managing compute and storage, and setting up cloud architectures for clients, tenants, and containers. They also monitor data center hardware, servers, networks, and communications systems for operational continuity and efficiency.
Data Security Expert
Mid-market firms also need a way to channel the talents of a data security expert, CISO, or cybersecurity director to ensure cyber-security for the company’s data. Data security experts must keep current on emerging threats while executing data security strategies to fend off and remediate attacks. This involves a wide range of duties, including working closely with the IT team to run the company’s Security Operations Center (SOC), constantly monitoring servers, networks, and workstations for security threats, and staying up to date on the changing compliance laws and regulations for the business, to name a few. While larger IT teams have bandwidth to fill cybersecurity needs inhouse, many midmarket IT teams do not have capacity for the 24/7/365 monitoring and security edits needed to thwart attacks, let alone bandwidth for executing on mitigation and response strategies needed to overcome them.
Data Engineer
A data engineer’s primary job is to prepare data for analysis or operational uses, which involves integrating data from different sources, as well as implementing and executing data profiling, cleansing, transforming, and normalizing data. Data engineers also work with data in motion and use master data management to ensure data consistency across an organization. Finally, a data engineer is your go-to technical resource for database construction and management, helping to optimize the company’s data ecosystem.
Data Scientist
It should be clear now why a mid-market IT manager should not be expected to take on these additional professional roles, but in case there’s any doubt, keep in mind that a data scientist is also needed. Data scientists develop algorithms and leverage deep learning models to analyze data with artificial intelligence and machine learning. The data scientist creates the “brain” of the data analytics solution to position it for providing accurate answers based on business information. Data scientists also mine data to find opportunities for business growth and efficiency. Ideally, the data scientist uses tools that enable non-technical business users to query data sets without having to write SQL or other code.
Master of One
If you’ve correctly determined that your mid-market IT department does not have enough time to absorb these data roles into their regular duties of keeping your company systems stable and responding to help desk tickets from your team, don’t despair. There’s a viable solution for mid-market businesses with this dilemma: they can partner with data experts who provide a side-by-side model coupling technology with talent. This allows the mid-market to efficiently compete, leveraging the necessary skillsets to achieve digital transformation success.
What does successful mid-market digital transformation require? The key is to have a cloud-based data center, a cloud native data management platform, and cloud native analytics, thus shifting the burden of procuring and maintaining the infrastructure to a third-party vendor in the data industry. Instead of attempting to reinvent the wheel in house, mid-market players should ensure they’re partnered with the right infrastructure to maximize the data-center capabilities, and data storage and management, for effective digital transformation.
Mid-market firms can gain the benefits of working with a wide range of experts including cloud engineers, data engineers, security experts, data scientists, and other highly skilled technical resources if they establish a partnership with a data platform company. By opting for this type of side-by-side expert help, the mid-market can achieve true business value—without needing to hire an entire data team.
