Cybersecurity is a big deal for businesses in every industry, so if you’ve invested a lot of money into preventing cyberattacks, you’re not alone. After all, cyberattacks can cost a small business $200,000 on average. This is why companies often use a range of tools to protect their assets. But if you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the number of tools your company uses to prevent cyberattacks, you might be dealing with cybersecurity tool sprawling. Here’s what that is and how to avoid it.
What Is Cybersecurity Sprawling?
Simply put, cybersecurity sprawling is what happens when you use too many tools to prevent cyberattacks on your business. Though you certainly want to do everything you can to stop cybercriminals, there’s a point when you begin hurting your bottom-line.
In fact, tool sprawl can cost you money, as it reduces IT productivity since your team is busy installing, monitoring and troubleshooting multiple tools. Think about the hours your team would have to spend figuring out how to use every cybersecurity tool you invest in, and it becomes clear how tool sprawling can get expensive.
Additionally, tool sprawling can reduce the quality of your threat response. When your team has to read alerts and collect logs from multiple tools, it can take longer to decide what action to take when a threat appears. Plus, some tools have vulnerabilities that cybercriminals can exploit, especially if they haven’t been updated. As a result, juggling too many cybersecurity tools can reduce the speed and effectiveness of your threat response.
Many business owners are finding this out the hard way, as cybersecurity sprawling is common. A Forrester survey found that 55 percent of respondents use 20 or more tools for cybersecurity and operations. Fortunately, there’s a simple way to avoid cybersecurity sprawling, and that’s by using managed cybersecurity services.
How Can Managed Cybersecurity Services Help You Avoid Tool Sprawling?
If your team is struggling to keep up with all the tools you use, it’s time to let a unified platform take over. When you switch over, it frees up your team’s time, and allows employees to spend their workdays progressing in other areas instead of trying to keep up with dozens of cybersecurity solutions. And, you can rest assured your IT systems will be less susceptible to downtime virus attacks, and data loss.
When you let a managed cybersecurity services team handle your IT systems, you can expect daily automated scans to ensure your data is backed up in the cloud and antivirus programs are working. You can also expect 24/7 server and network monitoring.
If you’re looking for help with managing data in the cloud, you can find what you need with managed cybersecurity services. Just be sure you know the services you’re looking for, and start by knowing the differences between cloud storage and cloud backup. If you’re not sure, note that cloud storage uses the internet to transfer data to an offsite server where you can easily and safely store and access that information. Basically, it’s a secure alternative—or even addition—to a hard drive that you’d normally keep on site.
Cloud backup is a way to protect data by sending a copy to an offsite server so if you lose the original data, you can access it through the offsite copy. With cloud backup, your files are often encrypted before being transferred and before being stored. And with cloud backup, all files are automatically synced from your computer to the cloud rather than you having to select which ones to transfer.
With a better idea about what kind of security to implement, you can consult with managed cybersecurity services for solutions that would work best for your business. Contact Novus Technology Integration today to get started.