When you think of a cyberattack, you might think of a basement-dwelling teenager spending hours trying to break into business networks.

Cyber security isn’t just a matter of IT. Adequate security relies on system-wide coordination among people and processes, touching every aspect of IT administration.

Compared to the previous years, 2021 saw a significant increase in cyberattacks. IoT rose by 6%, cryptojacking rose 19%, and ransomware attacks rose by a staggering 105% between 2020 and 2021. Regardless of the size of a company, having adequate cybersecurity equipment and protocols is essential for any successful business. 

IT downtime is a certainty in any business. Even with advanced cybersecurity planning and ironclad disaster recovery tools, most companies will eventually need to contend with a loss of system operation.

Famed American poet Robert Frost wrote “good fences make good neighbors” in his 1914 poem, “Mending Wall.” While the literati might like to spend countless hours parsing every word in that phrase, we’re taking it more literally.

Anyone who's ever worked in a client-facing role knows that contrary to the adage, silence is not golden. Client relationships — especially contractual obligations and expectations for deliverables — require healthy and effective communication.

“If you have ten priorities,” a wise person once said, “then you have no priorities.” Nowhere is this more true than in the world of IT incident management. All IT incidents are a top priority–to the people affected by them. 

In a perfect world, companies would never experience business relationships with service providers, vendors, or even clients where a disconnect occurs. Instead, everyone would be in sync, and as a result business would run smoothly. The reality, however, can be quite different.

Any textbook or guide on organizational performance management will tell you that you can’t improve what you don’t measure. The whole idea of key performance indicators (KPIs) is that they provide a brief measurement of some performance metric based on accurate data.