Business Continuity After a Pandemic by Craig Patterson – SVP of Global Channels, Aryaka – TECHNOLOGY RESELLER

We don’t need to hear another statistic about the remote or hybrid workforce. It’s real and it’s here to stay. What the channel needs to start talking to customers about is how to ensure that the next “disaster” is mitigated as much as possible. Whether the problem is local, like a network outage, something technical, like a ransomware attack, or another global crisis.

Businesses have embraced so many different systems to facilitate hybrid work in such a short time that it becomes too difficult to manage them all effectively. It is therefore vital that resellers and MSPs ensure that enterprise customers have the tools to control, optimize and secure all of these platforms as the boundaries of the network continue to expand.

Prepare for the unexpected
As IT teams—both enterprise and channel—are asked to do more with less, working with customers to develop a robust disaster recovery plan is essential. For example, in a ransomware situation, who should you contact? What apps should work no matter what? Who and how can you exclude potentially compromised users or devices?

Running scenarios with clients is great practice for those involved, ensuring all deliverables are covered and providing confidence that your team is up to the challenge, building your credibility as their trusted IT advocate.

Taking just one scenario a little further; ransomware attacks. Recently published research shows that unpatched vulnerabilities are directly responsible for up to 60% of all data breaches. It also became clear that executives expect attacks that primarily target software configuration weaknesses, poor maintenance, human error, and unknown assets.

Therefore, providing timely fixes, updates, and establishing best practices in customer organizations will save a lot of heartache if the worst happens. Whether it’s an unpreventable event or a hack, a solid disaster recovery strategy backed by the right daily habits will mitigate negative outcomes. Effects such as impact on PR, brand trust, loss of revenue for both end users and their channel providers can be reduced or completely prevented!

Embrace Zero Trust

Given the number of users in global organizations, it’s no wonder that even the best IT teams struggle to keep up with every device or application that enters the WAN. And now that employees can work anywhere at any time, enterprises need assurances that their security processes can immediately cover new services, devices and access points, while ensuring that the WAN remains properly secured.

The most effective way to offer this peace of mind is through a broad, zero-trust approach to consistent validation at every stage of digital interactions. This ensures that consistent security policies are enforced across offices and remote users, while providing the best possible application performance and network stability from day one.

Keep the momentum going

Enterprises don’t want to look back over the past few years and worry about which platforms they used there should be adopted. They want their existing platforms to just work, instead of their investment going to waste.

So, rather than pointing the finger at an app that isn’t performing as expected and offering a replacement — sending customers back to square one — it’s wise to first make sure that network-to-network, country-to-country variations in app performance aren’t are the underlying cause.

In summary, the antidote to these increasingly complex technology packages is not more stuff. Rather, convergence is the key to unifying these disparate security services—network monitoring, managed firewalls, secure web gateways, private access, reporting, and so on. – in one platform for much simpler management and seamless integration with new services adopted in the future.

This is how the channel can ensure that customers are confident in their digital transformation journeys – and that their data is fully protected. They are then free to take full advantage of the newfound flexibility, agility and control they have over their applications, tools and network through a converged SD-WAN and SASE solution, with Zero Trust at its core.

For more information visit www.aryaka.com

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