On May 8^th through May 9^th, 2023, Cyber Advisors had the opportunity to attend the Minnesota Bankers Association – Operations and Technology Conference. The annual event in Nisswa, Minnesota is a highly anticipated event for us each year as it allows us to connect with our customers and others in the banking industry. This year, our VP of Strategy, Dan Sanderson was able to get up in front of the audience and talk about Microsoft 365.

At Cyber Advisors, we believe the Primary Engineer is one of the most crucial roles we use so you have a great experience with our Managed IT Services. Yet, the value of having a Primary Engineer working with you is not always well understood before a Managed IT Services agreement begins. There are other Managed IT Service Providers that do not provide a dedicated Engineer-level resource to their customers. Instead, they provide a technician who is ready to serve when they are available, which may be a person the customer has never seen before. Without a complete understanding of their role and their value, the significance of the Primary Engineer may be overlooked.

According to a report from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, financial losses from cyber-crime grew 90% from 2017 to 2018, while the number of complaints only grew 16%¹. These numbers indicate that cyber criminals are getting more effective at siphoning large sums of money when they do succeed in compromising systems. This is likely due to the higher levels of sophisticated methods and tools they leverage to bypass traditional security measures such as next generation firewall and antivirus solutions. IT and Cyber Security Professionals in turn must also implement more sophisticated methods and tools to protect their organization’s digital assets.

A Security Breach Can Happen To Anyone: Small or Large

Many in the cyber security industry are aware of the Equifax breach. It was one of the largest and most well- known data breaches to date, affecting 143 million personally identifiable information (PII) records of U.S. citizens. Perhaps the most alarming detail about this breach was that Equifax did indeed have a robust security program. Hackers were able to circumvent security controls by exploiting a vulnerability in the open source component, Apache Struts, which is an open source web application framework used to develop Java web applications. During that same year, WannaCry ransomware was released into the wild and there were a record breaking 14,000 vulnerabilities reported to US-CERT, according to CVE details¹. In 2018, that number jumped to over 16,000. The lesson every organization should learn from this event is that a breach can happen to any business, small or large.

Why Outsource to a Managed IT Provider

Many organizations employ the services of a Managed IT Services Provider (MSP). One reason for this may be due to the high cost of employing an IT Professional in-house. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary for a Network Administrator in 2018 was $82,050 (not including costs of healthcare, paid time off, and other benefits). Given that the job market has continued to be at all-time lows, companies are focusing on leveraging their capital and other resources to focus on hiring talent that contributes to their core business. Shifting funds from strategic roles to support roles may hinder a company’s ability to compete, which may be a reason why companies are moving to and continue to outsource IT functions.