RenovoData was featured in the 3PL Perspectives publication with this article: “Cyber-Safe Roads: Mitigating Cyber Threats in Transportation and Logistics”.

3PL Perspectives is a third-party logistics magazine provided by the Transportation Intermediaries Association.

An excerpt is below:

“As the industry continues to embrace cloud platforms, automation, and data-driven technologies, it has become an increasingly attractive target for cyber attackers.”

You can read the complete article, “Cyber-Safe Roads: Mitigating Cyber Threats in Transportation and Logistics“.

RenovoData was featured in the 3PL Perspectives publication with this article: “Build Organizational Resiliency Through Cyber Training“. 3PL Perspectives is a third-party logistics magazine provided by the Transportation Intermediaries Association.

An excerpt is below:

“More than ever before, supply chain and logistics organizations are under the constant, unrelenting threat of cyberattacks.”

You can read the complete article, “Build Organizational Resiliency Through Cyber Training“.

RenovoData was featured in the 3PL Perspectives publication with this article: “Preparing for Resilience: Disaster Recovery Plans“. 3PL Perspectives is a third-party logistics magazine provided by the Transportation Intermediaries Association.

An excerpt is below:

“A DR Plan is created to protect your company’s infrastructure and data during an event that could cause disruption to operations by providing procedures that minimizes downtime.”

You can read the complete article, click the PDF here:  Preparing for Resilience: Disaster Recovery Plans

An article, “Disaster Recovery: Time Is of the Essence“ was published in 3PL Perspectives.

An excerpt is below:

“In the event of a disaster, the speed with which your data and services can be restored significantly limits the harm to your company. As long as your system is down, the cost meter keeps running, so recovery time must always be a central concern.”

Read the complete article in 3PL Perspectives: “Disaster Recovery: Time Is of the Essence“ written by RenovoData’s Chuck Cook.

RenovoData was featured in 3PL Perspectives magazine. The article, “Blockchain Brings New Capabilities, but Proceed with Caution”, includes a series of facts about how blockchain works and what makes it so widely used, but most importantly it shared information on potential problems of the system and how to protect your company.

Excerpt:

Because blockchain networks are not designed to be connected to any other systems, they contribute a level of security, but they do not overcome the dangers of breaches and breakdowns. Indeed, blockchain brings new risks in the form of additional hardware, software and activities, all of which need to be defended. Here are some possible difficulties with blockchain networks:

• Risks are highest during the early stages of any technology.
• When a blockchain network connects several companies, each of them is obligated to provide strong security. If even one company does not, all participating organizations are endangered …

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The Logistics Journal ran an article, written by RenovoData. The article provides expert-level details on ransomware as a service (RaaS) and how it can affect 3PL and Trucking companies.

Excerpt:

Would-be extortionists can now order easy-to-implement ransomware kits on the Dark Web. Just over a decade ago, IT users began experiencing attacks of ransomware, and in the intervening years it has become the most widespread and damaging variety of malware, gaining international notoriety as a thread to individuals and organizations large and small. Ransomware enters systems through fake emails or other notifications, capturing data and holding it captive until a ransom is paid…
To view and read the whole article, please choose from the following options:

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Think of the ways your business relies on IT. Manufacturing and inventory, internal and external communications, sales, delivery, marketing, purchasing, HR, supply chain and transactions of every kind – the list goes on. Add to that the IT systems that perform tasks that did not exist before automation, and it goes without saying that virtually all these are connected to the Internet.

Progress comes at a price

Today’s IT-based business environments are not simply constantly growing collections of software and hardware products. E-proliferation has sparked the creation of new tools to manage all that technology. Chief among these is the cloud, which answers the question of what to do with the great masses of data you generate.

So far, so good, but how do you keep all your devices and systems running and interacting effectively? The cloud-enabled, interlocking technologies that accelerate, expand and improve business functions also significantly increase the risk of prolonged downtime and harmful loss of data. When even a single application goes down, the entire company takes a hit.

The more sophisticated the IT environment, the greater the potential damage to the organization. Downtime losses cannot be shrugged off as a normal cost of doing business. Sources differ as to the exact value of lost time and data, but study after study presents alarming estimates. In a recent Aberdeen Group study, for example, the direct losses to large businesses to be around $164,000 per hour, with proportionally comparable losses to smaller companies.

We tend to think of downtime losses as being a headache for major corporations only (Think the 30-minute 2013 outage that cost Amazon $2 million), but the same degree of loss can be expected for companies of any size.

Typical direct losses include the temporary absence of the downed service itself as well as the potential loss of data that can cause devastating financial and legal setbacks. Because of its highly subjective nature, damage to customer relations can be equally disastrous and impossible to evaluate in advance.

The key to lowering downtime is its corollary: Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

With the right tools and expertise, it is realistic to aim for the highest possible availability, which can cut downtime from days or hours per year to a matter of a few minutes annually.

Conventional hosting providers can offer higher availability than a company using only its internal resources, and these providers typically promise 99% availability. This sounds good at first, but one percent downtime is more than three and a half days. Bear in mind that downtimes are much more likely to occur during periods of peak activity, exactly the times when you can least afford to be unplugged that long.

You can do better than that.

DRaaS means coming as close as realistically possible to uninterrupted operations. That adds up to benefits beyond the solution of downtime problems. Let’s look at some key benefits of DRaaS.

• Cut the risk of data loss to a negligible level.
• Use data replication to strengthen your backup.
• Reduce company-wide impact during backup.
• Perform maintenance without impacting your customers.
• Raise your reputation in comparison with competitors.
• Improve your application performance.

Your ideal DRaaS approach includes a combination of products, services and best practices that promote foolproof redundancy and invincible protection of tour infrastructure. Here are some key concepts:

• Make your overall system as simple as possible. The more elements it contains, the greater the risk of failure. Learn as much as you can about each component so you can take advantage of all its features, especially those that can reduce complexity.
• Be aware that replication is not backup. In many cases, recovery is only possible through backup files, and replication preserves errors that you do not want to recover.
• Choose only scalable systems and applications throughout your company. This allows you to handle both steady growth and unanticipated spikes. Look for scalable solutions with the elasticity to evolve automatically to fit your requirements.
• Use replication and failover servers to build in all the redundancy you can afford.
• Look for ways to integrate your backup, disaster recovery and DRaaS solutions.
• Distribute loads between multiple servers. Any single-server setup invites failure and limits scalability.
• Above all, test and retest. Look at redundancies, overload potentials, and every known potential malfunction of every element.

The following to-do list is part of an implementation strategy that requires industry-leading tools and deep expertise, guided by RenovoData Consulting.

1) Data Protection: Provides peace of mind with a broad array of tools to protect and restore databases, software, email, telecoms and operating systems after systems are repaired or replaced.

• Cloud Backup
• Cloud-to-Cloud Backup
• Backup in a Box
• Local Disk Backup
• Private Data Vaulting
• Cloud Data Archiving

2) Server Recovery: Provides solutions such as bare metal backup, virtual machine backup and server cloning to reduce the time to rebuild Operating System Environments (OSE’s).

• Renovo Recovery Server
• Cloud Disaster Recovery

3) DRaaS Solutions: Customized solutions provide a “pre-built” recovery environment for organizations who cannot tolerate downtime.  Use our cloud or your secondary site.

• DRaaS

Earlier this month, Forsythe Solutions Group, Inc. published an article entitled: “Mobile Device Security in the Workplace: 6 Key Risks & Challenges”. In it, the authors assert that mobile devices such as iPhones and Androids are the constant companion for many modern employees. This allows the employee to keep emails, updates and calls within arm’s reach (or closer) at all times.

The widespread and ubiquitous integration of smartphones and tablets into our daily lives has created an environment where hackers are taking every opportunity to gain access and steal user data. The common perception is that these smartphones and other mobile devices are secure by default – this is a potentially dangerous and costly misconception. If a user fails to take the necessary security precautions, which they may or may not be fully aware of, this could leave the endpoint device vulnerable to a cyber-attack. As the Forsythe Solutions article points out, “With the right (inexpensive) equipment, hackers can gain access to a nearby mobile device in less than 30 seconds and either mirror the device and see everything on it, or install malware that will enable them to siphon data from it at their leisure.” And THAT is scary.

What this all means for business owners is that their data now extends far beyond the protection of the company’s firewall or servers. If trends continue as they have, a significant and growing percentage of corporate data will go directly from employee endpoint devices to the cloud. Now is the time for all business owners to recognize where their data is, who has access to that data, and where it is going.

Forsythe Solution Group lists the key risks and challenges of mobile device security as:

• Physical Access – where the device is located and if it becomes lost or stolen, experienced hackers can retrieve sensitive information even when the endpoint device has been “wiped” or reset.
• Malicious Code – this includes spam, phishing, weaponized links, and rogue applications or code sent via text. Check out This Text Message Will Crash Your iPhone
• Device Attacks – designed to either gain control of the device or function similar to DDoS attacks on PCs
• Communication Interruption – the key points of weakness here are Wi-Fi networks. Wi-Fi hacking and man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks are considered to be relatively easy to execute. Also, criminals can potentially intercept and decrypt cellular data transmissions.
• Insider Threats – whether accidental through the misuse of personal data sharing services or malicious through the unauthorized transfer of corporate data, the potential for insider threats will persist within many business environments.

Business owners must recognize the potential for data breach/data loss and take proactive steps to minimize these threats. This can be accomplished through communication, education and training of employees. Other factors to include are top-down policy creation and program implementation, thorough risk assessment, as well as monitoring and evaluation conducted on a regular basis.

As the old saying goes, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” And that is something we all want to avoid!