Podcast Show Notes
Disaster recovery is a critical part of business continuity and it absolutely requires a multi-faceted approach.
Listen in as we talk about how to protect organizations of all sizes from threats like hurricanes and ransomware using solutions that are more cost-effective than ever before. We’ll touch on many of the elements that make up the suite of safeguards every organization needs, including well-architected data centers, end-user training, safelinks and more. If you hear something that especially sparks your interest, contact us for deeper conversation about disaster recovery tailored to your organization’s needs. You can always find us at www.threadfin.com.
Listen to the full episode here.
Watch this episode on our YouTube channel.
Podcast Transcript
Intro:
Welcome to Experience Threading: The Podcast where we discuss human-centered, outcome-focused digital transformation. If you’ve ever wondered, how can we make it easier for people to get their work done? How can I move to the cloud and then stay in the cloud? What’s the best way to handle risk in this work anywhere world? Then we invite you to listen in for the tools, techniques and best practices you need to overcome these challenges.
Sara Keeney:
This shorty episode is part of a longer conversation with Matt Nixon, one of Threadfin’s Principal Consultants. Matt, known for his expertise and experience across myriad sectors has been in IT for more than 20 years. In this portion of our conversation, we talk about business continuity and its importance in all organizations, both big and small.
Sara Keeney:
Hi, I’m Sara Keeney. I’m the Director of Marketing and Communications at Threadfin, and I’m here with Matt Nixon today. Matt is one of the Principal Consultants at Threadfin. Matt, thanks for joining me today.
Matt Nixon:
Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
Sara Keeney:
I know right now one of the things that’s been at the front of everybody’s minds, especially in Florida in the last few months is business continuity. I know that’s a really hot topic right now. Talk to me a little bit about that.
Matt Nixon:
We’ve been doing a few things to really help people with business continuity from two perspectives. So obviously we have the disaster standpoint. We’re very cognizant of that here in Florida, if you just had two hurricanes come through this year, we have two hurricanes every year feels like, right? So from that standpoint, that’s really important to us. But also from the standpoint of what happens if, you know, we provide lots and lots of protection for incidents with ransomware, those sorts of things. Okay? But we want to make sure that’s a multifaceted approach so that if something like that occurs, we’re able to assist and provide recovery to our customers through that. So one of the big things that we’ve been utilizing is, whether it’s Azure or AWS, providing disaster recovery through those services.
Matt Nixon:
It’s been really neat to be able to have a relatively low cost data center that we can turn up in both AWS or in Azure within, you know, 20 to 30 minutes of when we decide, Hey, we’re going to cut the switch over here and we’re now going to turn up our data center in AWS or in Azure with relatively minimal business impact. So we go through and we’ll set up all the infrastructure that’s necessary ahead of time and make sure that that looks like it’s supposed to. And then when an outage occurs, our data center had the roof ripped off of it in a hurricane or you know, whatever that scenario might be, that you have ransomware on your network and you don’t know what’s good and what’s bad, right? No idea.
Matt Nixon:
So at that point we can say, Hey, yeah, let’s deploy the infrastructure from eight hours ago or from real time in AWS or in Azure, whichever service it is, we deploy it in both. And we do that cross-cloud too. Because Azure or AWS, at the end of the day, it’s still somebody else’s data center. There is an opportunity for the services in both of these places to have issues. And so in each scenario we can turn up their infrastructure either in real time, if it’s a physical kind of issue or an outage, or we can roll back in time some, you know, five hours, two days, two weeks, and turn back on the infrastructure as it was at this point in time. And so we turn that on and it then enables them to have that business continuity, and we then are able to leverage all of the security and features and functionalities that are in the cloud to make sure that their infrastructure environment’s safe.
Sara Keeney:
So this infrastructure is really protecting them, if something happens, if there’s some type of disaster. How do we protect them…I mean, natural disaster is one thing, but ransomware and that type of thing, it’s happening far more frequently, I think, than people realize. So how do we protect for that ahead of time?
Matt Nixon:
Yeah. So when it comes to ransomware, it really is absolutely a multifaceted approach. We’re making sure that user education experience is a huge factor within that. So we’re making sure that their experience, the user’s experience is, I don’t want to say that we make it a lot harder for them to mess up. We engage in user training so that they are are used to knowing what those things look like. And you know that they’re not clicking the links, right? Hopefully, or we’re minimizing them clicking the links. And you can only do so much in each one of these areas. So eventually you’re trying to take it and provide secure multi-layers, multi-facets to make sure that the risk is as minimized as possible.
Sara Keeney:
Put all that stuff behind the scenes all the way through to the end user having all those different mechanisms to protect them.
Matt Nixon:
Yes. Absolutely. So user training, making sure that safelinks are enabled, that content filtering is enabled for URLs all the way back into making sure that there are good traditional backups, whether you’re in the cloud or not. You still need that data backed up and then all the way back to saying, Hey, we need a disaster coverage solution for when something like this occurs. So it’s pretty neat. It’s been neat to deploy this for some large organizations and to know that if the worst case scenario happens that we also have a…you know, nothing’s perfect. There’s always, if this happens, if you have a major ransomware issue, it’s going to be pain and suffering. But it’s going to be pain and suffering that has an answer, that we have a solution to be able to go and it’s, you know, we’re not all going to be just like,
Sara Keeney:
Like all is not lost.
Matt Nixon:
All is not lost. We might not be going out to dinner that night and hanging out with our friends, but we’re still going to-the business is still going to exist and function. Business is going to continue.
Sara Keeney:
Everybody’s still going to have their job.
Matt Nixon:
Yeah. These are not RGE, you know, resume generating events.
Sara Keeney:
I love that. Not a resume generating event. Everybody has their jobs, the customers are still protected and safe and those sorts of things, so Yeah. Very cool.
Matt Nixon:
It’s a neat thing to be able to be involved in, to know that hey, these large organizations, and in small organizations too, they benefit. Like, even these hundred user or hundred employee kind of shops are able to benefit from this and they actually can benefit more because it’s really low cost, relatively speaking. And the complexity of building that infrastructure is way lower and so we’re able to deploy that much faster and recovery is easier for them as well.
Sara Keeney:
So, you know, I often think, okay, these big organizations are going to be the ones that are the targets, but that’s not actually the case. You mentioned smaller organizations, and I’ve heard stories recently where real small organizations are getting targeted and getting attacked. Are you finding the same thing?
Matt Nixon:
Yeah. It’s amazing how much…I think as artificial intelligence begins to pick up, we’re going to see that smaller organizations are way more readily being targeted.
Sara Keeney:
Is that because they’re more vulnerable?
Matt Nixon:
They’re, well, they’re more vulnerable, but people didn’t necessarily care to bother because why bother? It’s a effort reward ratio. But now, because with AI, I think is going to start really picking up. We’re just seeing that right now in media a lot, that as the AI becomes more intelligent (that it actually becomes intelligent), which it’s really kind of beginning to, we’re beginning to see that the cost for these bad actors to start targeting small organizations becomes worth it.
Sara Keeney:
Because for them, there’s, there’s not any cost. They can just deploy these AI things and then it’s going to go all over the place.
Matt Nixon:
Yeah. They’re much, much, much quicker at being able to find info information about a company and then tailor it so that they are directly targeted.
Sara Keeney:
Got it. Yeah. That, that’s frightening, isn’t it?
Matt Nixon:
It really is. Yeah. The, the concept of where this 50-60 user mom and pop shop, big mom-and-pop shop, small business, will be like, nobody’s going to bother with me. They’re looking for large companies, large corporations. Well, what happens is these guys don’t realize that they’re actually large organizations that have a lot of money, and they can’t get away with just saying, oh, we’re too small to be bothered with. Nobody will bother us. I think that that’s going away.
Sara Keeney:
Yeah. I think you’re right. And it’s good to know that there are solutions and cost effective solutions and solutions that are considering the end user experience, making sure that the users can still do their jobs while protecting them all the way through, no matter what size the organization is.
Matt Nixon:
Yeah, absolutely. There’s two ways to look at it. You can say, well, being a small business is no longer an excuse for not protecting yourself. You can say it that way, but I think the better way to actually view it is that you now have what big organizations, what cloud adoption can do for a small organization now enables them to do what the quote big boys were doing before. Cloud, if nothing else, it brings big cool tool sets that used to be too expensive for smaller shops. It now brings it to them and makes it relatively affordable.
Outro:
Thanks for listening to experience threading the podcast. We invite you to leave a rating and a review on the platform you use to listen to this podcast. If you heard something that especially sparked your interest, contact us for a deeper conversation tailored to your needs. You can always find us at threadfin.com.
Click here to listen to this podcast and many more like it. You can also subscribe on your favorite podcast player. Just search for Experience Threading: The Podcast.
Click here to watch this podcast and many more like it. While you’re there, go ahead and subscribe to our channel so you always catch the latest episodes.
