Digital Aspirations in Business

A recent PWC survey revealed that 64% of CISOs and CIOs expect a jump in reportable ransomware and software supply chain incidents in the second half of 2021. It’s a problem exacerbated by the unique cyber threats that occur when entire industries shift overnight to remote or hybrid work models.

As security engineers look to protect their companies from the pandemic-induced challenges, cloud-based and zero trust solutions have emerged as practices worth implementing. We discussed the cybersecurity conundrum on a recent episode of the Digital Aspirations in Business podcast.

Here are the major topics covered in our conversation:

Security challenges can quickly become difficult to manage – especially if you direct technology for a K12 or SMB organization where you can be wearing multiple IT hats. The threat landscape is constantly evolving. And with COVID, and work from home, accelerating cloud adoption, your network has become more complex as well. What you need is a simple, straightforward way to view security threats to your network and take action to prevent, protect and remediate any damage these threats might cause.

That’s why we are discussing ways to simplify security for small and mid-sized organizations in this episode of the Digital Aspirations for Business podcast. Host Doug Stevens and his guest Michael O’Connell, Security Solutions Architect at Aspire Technology Partners, discuss security threats like ransomware, adware, phishing, and botnets and how small to mid-size organizations can prepare and defend themselves using simple cloud-based tools.

Every enterprise uses some type of firewall to protect and prevent outside threats from entering the network. But today’s network is larger and more ambiguous than it was even a few months ago. You’re supporting a hybrid workplace that can change in real time. Your enterprise requires a firewall that can adapt and integrate with your other cloud security services. A cloud-delivered firewall provides your organization with visibility and control of traffic no matter it originates – HQ, branch office, or remote location. And it provides your IT team with a single pane of glass to cloud-deliver policies and simplify management.

On this episode of The Digital Aspirations in Business Podcast, host Michael O’Connell a Security Solutions Architect at Aspire Technology Partners, discuss how Cisco Umbrella Secure Internet Gateway (SIG) Firewall can protect your enterprise via a next-gen, cloud-delivered security service.

Your enterprise is facing a dilemma right now when it comes to security. On one hand, you’re likely supporting a hybrid workplace that requires anywhere, anytime internet access. You may have employees at the office and others working remotely from homes and smaller branch offices. This can make for an ever-expanding attack surface that requires greater support and more flexible security than you can provide with point solutions. You need to protect internet access across your network devices no matter where employees are working, that includes the corporate headquarters, a branch office, or grabbing a coffee at Starbucks. And you want to do that with a single, manageable solution.

On this episode of The Digital Aspirations in Business Podcast, host Michael O’Connell a Security Solutions Architect at Aspire Technology Partners, discuss how Cisco Umbrella Secure Internet Gateway (SIG) can cut complexity, reduce risk exposure, and improve network performance with a single cloud-delivered service that deploys easily and scales according with your business.

In the first part of our podcast we discussed how the new hybrid workplace – remote and on-prem – needs a scalable and manageable VDI solution. We talked about how Aspire, along with partners Cisco and NetApp, are helping IT teams deploy and mange large numbers of virtual desktops to enable remote VDI access to corporate resources. In this episode, the second part of our series, we take a deeper dive into the types of management tools for consideration by IT teams tasked with supporting a remote + on-prem workforce.

Join us for part two of the podcast with host Chistian Chavez, Solutions Architect at Aspire Technology Partners, and his industry pro guests – Brad TerEick, Cloud Infrastructure & Software Architect at Cisco, and Chuck Foley, Senior Director at NetApp. The trio discusses VDS or Virtual Desktop Service, which is a SaaS-delivered global control solution that can deploy, manage, and optimize your VDI environment, and Intersight Workload Optimizer, a SaaS-delivered real-time decision engine that works to increase performance of both public and private cloud environments. Get your notepads handy – there’s a lot to be learned in this episode!

If there is one word to describe the state of VDI today, that word is “scale.” Many companies were using virtual desktops in some limited capacity before 2020, but today, the wide-scale adoption of remote workplaces means that IT teams are often scrambling to provide access to corporate networks, storage, and other resources. Most organizations were not prepared to have dozens, hundreds and thousands of workers now remote and requiring access to on-premise resources. Providing and managing that remote VDI access to corporate resources is the topic of our Digital Aspirations in Business two-part podcast.

Join us for part one of the podcast as host Chistian Chavez, Solutions Architect at Aspire Technology Partners, leads a far-ranging discussion with two industry pros – Brad TerEick, Cloud Infrastructure & Software Architect at Cisco, and Chuck Foley, Senior Director at NetApp. The trio discuss how the recent shift to hybrid working has made many organizations consider scaling VDI across the enterprise and how, along with workplace flexibility, this can become an IT management nightmare if not properly handled.

In the past, business resiliency often sounded like acts of heroism – IT admins rushing to retrieve backup tapes from offsite archives to restore and recover lost data as quickly as possible to make everything go back to “the way it was.” Today, however, business resiliency means adjusting and adapting business operations; not just restoring IT to the way it was but changing business operations. Take the current environment and remote working, remote learning, and telemedicine. Business resilience isn’t about returning to the status quo, but adapting and redefining to new business conditions.

On this episode of The Digital Aspirations in Business Podcast, host Doug Stevens and his guests, Kevin Leahy, Director of Data Center Practice & Chandler Basset, Engineering Director, Northeast at Aspire Technology Partners, discuss business impact analysis, disaster recovery and how providing business resilience during the “new normal” is forcing businesses to become more innovative.

In a research note, Gartner recently said that in many organizations, especially mid-sized enterprises, IT has been over-invested in security protections, controls, and products. They recommended allocating more security budget toward managed detection and response (MDR). This makes sense. With new security challenges that we are seeing organizations dealing with, MDR is a reasonable methodology and tool set for threat mitigation.

On this episode of The Digital Aspirations in Business Podcast, host Doug Stevens and his guest, John Rossiter, Chief Architect of the Security Operations Center at Aspire Technology Partners, compare MDR to more traditional security approaches and tools and discuss where enterprises need to focus their attention – especially in today’s work from home environment which provides an expanded attack surface for corporate network threats.

Distributed networks are not new, but how we deploy and manage them has changed over the years. One key technology is software defined wide area network (SD-WAN), which Gartner says 60% of enterprises will have implemented by 2024. If your organization is among those that have implemented or are considering adopting SD-WAN, this podcast episode is for you!

On this episode of the Digital Aspirations for Business Podcast from Aspire Technology Partners, host Doug Stevens, Vice President for Managed Services, Aspire Technology Partners talks with his guest Cody Harris, Director of Digital Architectures, Aspire Technology Partners about the benefits of using software defined wide area network technology. Among these is the ability to provide ubiquitous access to applications and critical data for headquarters and branch offices alike. Join us now to learn more on the podcast.

We are at the beginning of The Data Decade as businesses learn how to leverage data analytics and enabling technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence to make meaningful decisions and take actions.

In this episode – part two of our two-part series – host Doug Stevens, Vice President of Managed Services at Aspire interviews his guest John Cope, Regional Technology Director at Aspire about the increasing impact of data on the enterprise. Stevens and Cope discuss leveraging IoT data to gain greater insights, keeping up with the pace of new cybersecurity threats, and how organizations are creating digital workspaces to enhance overall employee experience.