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Sherman: Welcome back to Biz Talk with Sherman I’m your host Sherman on from hotline Insurance services sharing your story in a show me world excited to have our next guest on it doesn’t seem like a week goes by where we don’t hear about cybersecurity and the importance of being able to take care of this as a business owner. So your tech, your biz. Roland Parker, welcome back to the show.
Roland Parker: Roland Hey, Sherman, Great to be back.
Sherman: All right. Now, I know that a lot of businesses out there, they might have an IT department, whether that’s external or internal, but how can they know that they’re keeping the business secure?
Roland Parker: So a lot of business owners, they look at they like dashboards, they like to look at their financials, they like to look at their inventory turn. And you can see, you know, are we doing a great job on a sales wide? What’s our cash flow looking at? But when it comes to IT, they don’t have a dashboard. So then they’re totally reliant on the IT department for trying to make themselves secure. And you don’t know what you don’t know until something happens. And that’s why it’s very important to say, okay, what can those business owners do to make sure that they actually are secure before something happens?
Sherman: Now, is there a certain test that a business owner can kind of run to be able to see that they’re secure from kind of outside attacks?
Roland Parker: Yeah. So there’s three different.Tests that you really want to look at. So let’s look at the first one. Is my business secure from the outside? How vulnerable am I from being attacked from an outside source? And that is done with what is called a penetration test. And what we can do is we can set it up to imitate what the hackers would be doing, run those penetration tests and then give you the feedback. So, you know, okay, these are my loopholes. What do I need to patch before it happens? So that’s the first step, that penetration test, making sure that your business is secure from the outside.
Sherman: Now, what about are there any other tests that you can do in order to see if there’s kind of some vulnerabilities to the network? I don’t know if I’m explaining that correctly.
Roland Parker: So really what you want to look at is, okay, my network, you’ve made it secure from the outside. Then you want to look at from the inside, how secure is your network? Secure from an internal perspective, from an employee perspective, document control. And that is when we can run an internal network assessment, we’ll come in, assess the network and look at the vulnerabilities from the internal looking out and making sure that your data is secure and we can provide you with those dashboards to give you the peace of mind.
Sherman: Now, I know there’s this weird thing out there. It’s called the dark Web right now. This sounds like something out of science fiction. Okay. So I think help us understand, number one, Roland, is this something that’s, like completely so far fetched it’s out there that doesn’t really affect the average person, the average business owner out there.
Roland Parker: So pretty much at this stage, you’re going to be guaranteed that your information or part of your information is on the dark Web. It’s just the world we live in now. You may have not done anything incorrectly, but somebody that you do business with and you’ve had your credentials, they could have been compromised. Your information is out there. That’s just the fact of it. So what can you do? Well, run a dark Web scan. We can run that for you. And once you know what information is out there, you can see, okay, this is my legitimate password that’s tied to my email. I need to go and make sure that I change my financial information. I change my email information, whatever it is. You just need to make sure, okay, once it is leaked, you’ve got to make those changes. It’s very difficult to remove it, but at least you were warned in advance. Okay, these credentials are out there now. I need to make the relative changes and I need to increase my security.
Sherman: Now, I know that there’s some different companies that might get like cyber security insurance to protect against this this this proprietary or this crucial client information from getting out there. Is that something that your team would then work with to be able to make sure that they the company is adhering to all those different requirements in order for their cyber security policy to be enforced?
Speaker3: Absolutely.
Roland Parker: Really, when it comes to cyber security, it’s a matter of working with the business owner, your insurance company and your IT guys. And those three together have got to come up with a plan that’s going to make you secure, but also make sure that you don’t have any claims that are nullified just because something was was not being done.
Sherman: Now, when it comes to backups, I think a lot of times we think, hey, just because I’m on the network at the office, I should be back and it’s automatically backing up. Right. So, Roland, how do I know if these back these backups are actually working for all the employees here?
Speaker3: Well, as a.
Roland Parker: Business owner, what? You really want to be doing is getting the reports to show that your backups have been done correctly, but you want your IT guy coming to you and say, okay, we’ve now run the test. We’ve been able to spin up your environment in the cloud and we’ve tested it. So should something happen, we can now go back and recover from the backup. Don’t wait until something happens to realize, wow, my backups didn’t work. You really want to make sure that your IT guys are testing your backups, They are able to spin up your server. And if you’ve got critical machines that are that are not being backed up, sometimes people back up their servers, but they forget about mission critical machines. You want to make sure those are on your backup plan as well and test your backups. If you don’t test your backups, it may be too late when disaster strikes. You don’t want to be waiting to let the time that you test your backup because they may not work.
Sherman: Such good advice. Now, I know there’s a lot of businesses out there. They might have an IT department and I know you you guys over there at Impress computers can work with them or I know a business owner might be watching this or listening to this and going, you know what? I don’t have the right things in place. How can they reach out to you and your team over there at Impress computers? The best.
Speaker3: Thing to do is reach us at.
Roland Parker: (281) 647-9977 or reach us on the web. Impress computers dot tech that’s impress computers.tech and we’ll schedule an onsite assessment, sit down with you and discuss what your best options are.
Sherman: Wonderful. Well, we really appreciate you coming on the show, sharing us that such profound advice for us with business owners. What we’re going to be able to do is, as we look at this rolling, I want to know for for from the perspective of a business owner with what they’re kind of dealing with, is there any way that they can you know, cost is a big issue, right? So how can they kind of implement a lot of the things that we’re talking about without it kind of breaking the bank?
Roland Parker: So the first starters will sit down with you. We’ll come up with a plan and we are not going to charge you anything to do those initial assessments, we’ll come in to give you the peace of mind. We can run the penetration test, we can do the dark Web scans, we can do the network assessments, and we can check your backups. We’re not going to charge you anything for that. And then we’ll come with up with a cost effective plan to get you protected in the future. Even if you’ve got an internal IT department, let us work with them in developing that plan to make sure that you have the peace of mind.
Sherman: Wonderful. Well, we appreciate you coming on the show. We’re going to take a quick commercial break, folks, and we’ll just be right back with more Biz Talk with Sherman.