Video: BizCom Global CEO Explains The Greatest Risks To Customers

hello and welcome to this episode of partner POV brought to you by biscom global I'm your host Katie boso in a year that has tested the security of businesses around the world how can you prevent your business from becoming another statistic the hard truth is small to mediumsized businesses are the victims of cyber attacks preventable internal mistakes and natural disasters every day they just aren't in the headlines biscom Global is on a mission to take their clients technology environments security snacks and compliance models from flimsy to fearsome and keep them that way I'd now like to welcome my guest today Mark weiner CEO of biscom global welcome Mark hi thank you Katie for having me thank you so much for being here Mark I'm really looking forward to our conversation today and I think the best way to start it off is to have you first introduce us to biscom Global for those who might not know about it you've been operating in the business supportive technology space for more than two decades in the last seven years as a managed service provider so when you describe biscom Global to people what do you say in a non-technical way I like to say we keep the bad guys out of your business we help improve employee productivity and we help prevent the employees from doing things that might hurt the company either on purpose or by accident what does that mean it means we're looking at cyber security compliance issues and generally managing day-to-day technical environments so mark this year we've seen the subject of cyber security and business continuity brought into the spotlight for all the wrong reasons we've seen millions of people have their private information Exposed on the dark web in recent months we all know about how a faulty security vendor software update knocked out services around the world over the summer and recently the Southeast region of the US was hit with back-to-back deadly hurricanes in the same month so how is your team not only protecting and securing your customers but also educating them on all the possible risks and threats and vulnerabilities out there that is such an interesting question and it is so complicated because everyone is where they stand and they only know what they know first of all second of all the danger to customers is huge obviously there's a lot of technical things that we do and put in place things like everyone hears about firewalls and access controls but but from a user standpoint the one thing that has to be protected more than anything else is how do we identify that you are you and that you are have the right to do something so we put a lot of attention into making sure that we can tell who is doing something and if they have the right to do that thing and we're using all sorts of Creative Technologies up to an including things that might have been heard out there multiactor authentication and other tools that are traditional like firewalls and we're also really employed what's known as a zero trust model across the mindset including at the laptop level or PC level because there are certain things that shouldn't be able to access other things within your computer and we talk to companies about this all the time whether it's one-on-one with their executive team it's when our team is doing support with the end users the importance and the reason you have to give up some day-to-day control to protect your underlying access and making sure you're doing what you're allowed to do and nothing more some very good points there and I'm sure you often encounter small to mediumsized business owners who don't want to pay for managed cyber security or additional Solutions because they don't believe they're a target of Bad actors how do you make them understand the risk of that assumption well first of all it's not an if you're going to get breached it's likely a win that's number number one number two the reality is it is far easier to penetrate the walls of a small company than a large company the users are the greatest risk to the company and when we don't provide proper training and small companies have a tendency of not providing the training it's easy to fake things and get the bad guys in the door and they sit there and they look at your company and go oh what can you actually afford to pay and it's not about what the data is worth to them it's what the data is worth to you can you imagine being down for a day a week a month and not having access to your systems having the data corrupted or encrypted or even not available and what happens when sensitive data gets released to the public and there are many examples this year of where data was breached in both large and small companies and then in the end ended up in the public Marketplace including Healthcare data a very sobering facts that you're letting us know about and it's really important to keep those in mind you have to ask yourself like you said what is that worth to you now we've discussed how your team is keeping your current customer secure and educated about the very real threats that are out there as we've just discussed and how you explain the risk of assuming you're too small to be worth attacking which we know if that you make that assumption it's just not true if there are standard best practi IES for security how does biscom Global's managed Services differ from other solution providers so first of all when we're providing a managed service one of the first things we're doing is we're evaluating a where you stand today B what laws regulations trade industry requirements that you're supposed to live up to and whether that's Bar Association requirements whether that's actual reporting requirements under under the law whether that's um accounting regulations whether that's IRS regulations there's regulations for everything that's where we start and then we go this is where you are we need to comply with these things as part of what we do and we're going to lay out a path to get you there we're going to figure out how do we protect you as the individual so that we know that your identity is protected what happens when you're traveling can you be in both North Carolina New York Russia and China at the same time on the computer you might be and we see that all the time and then we put tools in place to identify us for anomalies and we will actually lock people out until we can get to the bottom of something so you mentioned the magic word there compliance and you talked about how it's related to cyber security and business continuity very important most businesses consider compliance a four-letter word only dealing with the barest minimum to pass muster how do you approach compliance differently and build it into your managed Services offering what you're going to find within our offerings compliance is built in at every level as to what we do we may not be able to get you to a super high DOD secure in day one but we need to look at what you're actually doing what requirements do you have and there is more and more lawsuits happening over lost data there is more regulatory fines there is more impact that's happening when data gets out or when bad guys get in so compliance has got to be built into what we do and we leverage nist CSF which is the cyber security framework as our base and we tack in all of the other requirements that might apply to your specific business Mark I can't have a conversation about technology and security without talking about artificial intelligence artificial intelligence has been booming over the last 18 to 24 months and it's been really impressive I'm sure that you've noticed every day there is a new story about AI in the headlines so how is AI impacting your customers and what are you doing to guide them and keep them secure in relation to this AI boom that we've seen so first of all AI means a lot of things to a lot of people AI itself is not new but this generative AI is is relatively new and what's happening is how you look for information how you talk to the AI engines becomes very important as to what's in that model what's in that data stream and how do we make sure that we're not uploading confidential patient data uh research data client data into a public model so when we start talking about even AI within Office 365 there's a product called co-pilot we are very stringent we won't even let our clients enable this without going through an underlying security checklist what has been done to secure that that data what are we are we making sure we have the proper safeguards in place are we making sure that the AI is only looking internally only looking externally whatever the rules might be and then how do we put those guard rails including policy and procedure and training for your employees to make sure that when we're accessing information to create a document we're not accessing your bank account information and making that part of the document where I've actually seen lawyers actually manage to put a case record in into their AI model by accident it just comes back to education when you share a story like that right just comes back to knowing how to use something and especially how not to use it for sure and how do we make sure we put the actual technical guard rails in there as well so that certain data can't get in that's a very good point that you bring up how do we build that into the applications and into the technology so that if somebody who doesn't have the education is trying to do something that you don't want them to do how do we stop them from even getting in the door to be able to put that information in there exactly and so as far as AI goes I I actually do say the idea is to go slow to go fast take the time to do the planning take the time to actually look at the security pieces that need to be done take the time to make sure we have what's needed to be done so that you can then run very good advice and honestly very safe advice in this conversation Mark and I also want to ask you is there a success story that you can tell me that really brings biscom Global's work into the real world for anybody that is listening and says what do you do how exactly do you keep your customers safe tell me a success story in which you were able to help a customer innovate or solve a challenge so here's an interesting story with an engineering firm um some of the Technologies we put in place actually identified two employees were downloading data that they should have had access to but not in the volume they were downloading we quickly identified that they were trying to download hundreds of documents and we put a stop to it we actually then queried the people and they go oh we didn't know we were doing that when we got not good answers we went to management and let them know interestingly enough the PE the two people resigned three days later and they were trying to take that data with them and if it wasn't for the fact that our tools identified a data exfiltration they would have Tak a lot of data with them you brought up a really great point in showing that sometimes the internal people on your teams can be the ones who are causing an issue because at the end of the day every individual is looking out for themselves and the company has to figure out how to protect itself in a way that is not reliant on its individual employees so that particular story I think is something that is a wake-up call to a lot of businesses that are watching and listening yes absolutely moving on from there mark talk to to me about the network that biscom Global has within its portfolio of offerings what vendors do you work with to give customers the best tools and solutions possible so I want to start that off with we work with a lot of different vendors and from time to time our vendor stack changes based on what is most needed by the end user but we leverage best of breed products like Microsoft and acronis and CA and threat locker and SAS alerts and it goes on and on and on and on and we have good Partnerships with these companies where we have access to their engineering when there's things that are just unusual and they help us work with customers and likewise if something changes or something's better we have the ability to bring in new products and it doesn't necessarily from the End customer perspective they're not sitting here and trying to make a decision on this little thing we're making those decisions to deliver what's a captive secure service well Mark for the potential customers out there who would like to learn more about biscom global where can they go so first call us biscom Global is 919 85583 N9 or on our website at biscom global.com spell b i z c m g l o b l.com and we would love to sit down and talk to you and figure out how we can help you stay secure and be productive and I'd love to hit you with one last question there mark You're the CEO of your company talking to me today about something that many businesses have to think about what are you passionate about when helping your customers stay secure and how does that come out in those conversations with them so I think the number one thing is you both need to be secure and productive if I make you Totally Secure to the point that it is impossible to operate that doesn't do you any good so we need to boost both security training and the tools to make your company be able to excel thank you so much for your time today Mark it's been a pleasure speaking with you and thank you at home for joining us to see more episodes of partner po you can check out channel insider.com once again I'm Katie boso and I'll see you next time

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