Insights

Part 4 of 4:

As small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) increasingly leverage data for AI initiatives, they face a critical challenge: how to utilize sensitive information while maintaining privacy, security, and compliance. Traditional approaches like redaction—simply removing or masking sensitive elements—often strip data of its utility for AI training and analysis.

Do your end-users who handle files with intense graphics complain about performance when they work remotely? It might be time to add Graphical Processor Units (GPUs) to your servers. GPUs have moved beyond cutting-edge technology and the early-adopter stage. With many technology vendors investing heavily in GPUs, they are on the brink of becoming a mainstream technology.

A good business is always prepared for a breach or an attack on its IT systems. To ensure maximum security, a routine security audit should be conducted on a regular basis. An annual security audit prevents the chances of data breaches by ensuring you have the proper protections in place and that they are working as you would expect in the case of an attempted security or data breach. You can have a strong business or even extra security detail at every entrance, only to have one cyber-breach knock you flat.
So how do you avoid being compromised? The easy answer is to ensure you conduct a regular security audit. This will help to protect your business information, credit card information, passwords, and customer information – keeping you locked down and secure. Here are a few reasons why your business needs an annual security audit:

Regardless of the size of your business, today’s digital climate involves risks. In fact, smaller and mid-sized companies are open to more threats due to lack of protection and know how. Cyber security is a critical part of managing those risks and taking the necessary steps to protect your assets. It pertains to all the IT measures needed as preventative measure against cyber risks. Cyber risk is any risk of disruption, monetary loss, or reputational damage of an organization due to an IT system failure. Before stepping into the cyber security context, one needs to come to terms with the dynamics of the digital era and the highly vulnerable virtual environment of today.  

Investing in tools and systems that improve productivity has long been considered a necessary cost of doing business – a better set of tools creates a more productive workforce. In the 20th century, those kinds of technologies were essentially production-enhancing tools (think faster writing tools like the typewriter and word processors). Not all these improvements were required. Some companies did not feel the need to keep up with the latest trends. If you could afford them, great, but if you didn’t you still managed to get by.   

Everything fails. This is true for everything in life, including networks, databases and systems. No one can avoid failures and their lasting impacts. It is not so much the fact that they fail, but it is more about the costs and damage they leave behind, especially when considering IT downtime.

Whether you’re already in the cloud or thinking about moving an application or your entire IT infrastructure, security probably comes to mind first. Will your data in the cloud be safe from cybercriminals? And if you store customer data, you’re probably even more concerned.

Data backup and disaster recovery are two different procedures. Data backup is routine; disaster recovery is (or should be) a rare event. Indeed, by backing up critical business data, businesses make the first step to successfully recovering from a network disaster.