A large organization I work with recently experienced a serious cybersecurity incident. Ransomware had struck the business, crippling its technology systems and causing an outage that lasted more than 300 hours. This type of outage would have a devastating impact for any organization, but this company felt the pain acutely because it is a Software as a Service provider. The ransomware took down its SaaS offerings which, in turn, affected the critical business operations of hundreds of its customers.

After the dust settled, the company’s CISO contacted CDW to ask how we could help him better mitigate and respond to disasters in the future. He knew that deficiencies existed in the company’s technology architecture. He also understood that correcting the deficient technologies would not be enough. They needed assistance identifying gaps in their program in addition to understanding the impact of losing their SaaS offerings. The firm was determined to avoid the financial and reputational damage of another serious outage.

The sudden shutdown of physical offices across the country this spring has accelerated many organizations’ journeys down the digital transformation path. Companies that had previously been reluctant to adopt tools such as videoconferencing and cloud collaboration rolled those solutions out to users in a rush as they scrambled to enable remote work. Because they deployed so many solutions in such a short period of time, most organizations will want to undertake some sort of security assessment to be sure they haven’t opened themselves up to new vulnerabilities. But this moment also presents an opportunity for organizations to provide a permanent boost to their cybersecurity practices through ongoing engagements.

Here are three examples of CDW’s high-value cybersecurity offerings.

As they seek to enable remote work, many organizations are implementing new ways for employees to access and share data. This is all necessary to enable business continuity, but it’s possible (and perhaps even probable) that organizations are unwittingly opening up new security vulnerabilities as they introduce new technologies and workflows. Unless an IT shop employs professionals with deep expertise in cybersecurity, the prospect of hunting around for unknown security gaps can be incredibly daunting. That’s where cybersecurity assessments from a partner like CDW come in.

In our previous blog post, we took an in-depth look at why organizations are vulnerable. Now, we’ll take a step forward and move from an academic conversation toward a more practical and actionable path. According to Gartner, through 2022, at least 95 percent of cloud security failures are predicted to be the customer’s fault. Yikes!…