Everyone Is a Participant in Information Security

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The information security team may have security in their name, but that doesn’t mean they own it. Security requires the active participation of everyone in the company, from management to facilities staff, in order to prevent and respond to incidents.

Preventing Security Incidents

Everybody has a role in preventing a security incident:

Management: Management sets the standard of behavior for everyone else in the business. If managers are seen treating security casually, no one else will take it seriously, either. This means managers, including senior executives, need to participate in the security training that’s mandated for everyone else; they need to demonstrate safe computing practices, like not writing down passwords and sharing them with their admins; and treating compliance audits as beneficial, rather than a necessary evil.

Finance: The financial team needs to understand the value of spending on security and authorize the appropriate expenses. In addition, the financial team needs to understand the sensitivity of the data they work with and take steps to avoid falling for targeted spearphishing attacks that seek to steal account numbers or trigger funds transfers inappropriately.

Human resources: The HR team, through its training programs, is responsible for ensuring everyone receives the necessary information security training. In addition, the HR team has the responsibility for ensuring the hiring process employees appropriate background checks and handling disgruntled employees to minimize insider risks.

Facilities: Physical security of your premises is an important component of information security.

Information security: Of course, the information security team has a major role in preventing breaches through developing security strategies and implementing tools to protect valuable corporate data.

Everyone else: All employees are responsible for using safe computing practices, including creating strong passwords and not sharing them. Employees are responsible for paying attention to the mandated information security training and taking those lessons back to their workspaces.

Responding to Security Incidents

If you unfortunately experience a security breach, you need a solid incident response plan. Multiple teams will have roles in the response, including:

Management: Management is responsible for ensuring that the incident response plan is executed, as well as overseeing related activities.

Marketing and communications: One of the biggest challenges in responding to a breach is communicating the event and how you are responding to it. In addition, your teams may need to ramp up marketing to mitigate reputation damage and minimize lost business.

Legal and compliance: A data breach isn’t just an internal matter; depending on your industry and location, you may have to satisfy legal and regulatory mandates regarding notifications, compensation, and other breach-related events. Your legal and compliance teams will make sure you follow the letter of the law on these actions.

Information security: Your technology team needs to complete several different activities. First, they need to identify the impact of the breach and determine the extent of the data loss. Second, they need to discover the root cause that allowed the breach to occur, and implement a strategy to prevent that type of attack from recurring. In addition, they should conduct a thorough review to identify other vulnerabilities and take steps to reduce the risk you’ll be victimized through a different form of attack.

Learn more about creating a disaster recovery plan.

Contact CCS Technology to start developing a comprehensive information security strategy, or browse the additional resources below for more information on getting started.

Additional Information Security Resources

Create An Information Security Culture to Protect Your Data

Don’t Overlook These Information Security Basics

7 Common Mistakes That Place Your Data in Danger

Cloud Resolutions for the New Year

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The new year is a great time to review the technology you’re using and make changes, either introducing new technology or improving how you use your existing technology. Here are four things to look at to help you get more out of your cloud technology:

1. Get cloud spending under control

One of the biggest advantages of cloud is its cost savings, but you need to take steps to make sure spending doesn’t exceed expectations. Because cloud is self-service, it’s easy for users to initiate services without much review. Free trials are tempting, but when they aren’t canceled, they turn into ongoing expenses. Buying excess capacity is a good practice when you house resources in your data center, but it’s unnecessary and a hard habit to break when it comes to cloud, where capacity is available on demand. Choosing a more expensive data tier is another source of unnecessary expenses. Finally, remember cloud is pay-per-use, so make sure resources are shut down when not needed. This includes permanently shutting down development and test environments after the project is complete, as well as turning off applications that aren’t needed overnight. Learn more about controlling your cloud costs.

2. Consider going native

Probably most organizations take the “lift and shift” approach to transitioning to cloud. In this approach, you don’t rearchitect applications; you transition them as-is. The approach has the advantages of being simple. It’s also relatively fast and relatively low-risk. However, most existing applications aren’t designed to take advantage of all the cloud’s features. In particular, they don’t usually have a services-oriented architecture and aren’t able to take advantage of automatic scalability in the cloud. If you’ve already migrated applications to the cloud and things are running smoothly, take time this year to review the applications and identify where going cloud-native will offer advantages. Learn more about approaches to moving to the cloud.

3. Improve your security

Cloud security remains a top concern for many businesses, and there’s a good reason: cloud means shared resources and more points of access, meaning potentially greater risk. While your cloud provider takes many steps to protect the cloud, protecting your applications and your data remains your responsibility. Spend time reviewing your security posture, checking the tools and configurations you already have in place, and consider adding new cloud-centric controls such as a cloud access security broker. Learn more about ways to keep your cloud secure or information security basics.

4. Design your hybrid cloud

Almost no one, except for brand-new start-ups, has a pure cloud environment. Everyone else is working with a mix of cloud and legacy infrastructure, resulting in a confusing, difficult-to-manage hybrid architecture. Stop the chaos by taking a step back to evaluate the mixed infrastructure and plan how it can smartly evolve to let all the different elements work together in support of your business. Learn more about the flexibility of a hybrid cloud.

CCS Technology Can Help You Achieve Your 2020 Cloud Resolutions

If you’re ready to tackle any or all of these cloud resolutions in the new year, contact CCS Technology Group. Our cloud solutions help you design, implement, and manage the cloud you need in 2020 and beyond.

Additional Cloud Resources

New Year, New Cloud Choices and Challenges

Don’t Overlook These Aspects When You Plan Your Cloud Migration

Calculating the ROI of Moving to the Cloud

Why Growing Companies Need ERP Software

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Growing companies need Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. Put another way, if your business is growing, you may need to upgrade your legacy ERP software. While software alone won’t make your business grow, executing a growth plan without the right software will be a bigger challenge than it needs to be.

What’s New in ERP?

ERP is not new. You could even argue that it’s middle aged. The core of ERP, which was created to help run big factories and logistical operations, came into existence in the early 1970s. ERP’s origins lead some to consider the software to be a “heavy iron” technology, suited to global giants and industrial processes. There is still some truth to this, but we are now into a new generation of agile, powerful cloud-based ERP solutions.

Cloud ERP, as exemplified by Acumatica, makes it possible to deploy sophisticated business management solutions without installing software or buying any hardware. It’s available over the Web, via a browser. Acumatica is an extensible system. It can do basic ERP workloads like accounting and financial management, orders and invoicing and so forth. However, from there, you can add a significant portfolio of modules. These include software for warehouse management, field service, Customer Resource Management (CRM), HR, industry-specific applications and on and on.

Grow Revenue with ERP

Used the right way, ERP can facilitate revenue growth. This happens when you take advantage of sales management tools and functionality like quote-to-order and product configuration. With these capabilities, you can engage more closely with customers, responding to their needs quickly and closing more deals. The order fulfillment and subsequent customer support features in cloud ERP keep the customer relationship on a solid footing—leading to more repeat business and client references. This is possible without ERP, but it will be a lot more work.

Save and Invest for Growth

Modern cloud ERP drives savings across the business, including Operating Expense (OpEx) and Capital Expense (CapEx). You can use the proceeds of these savings to invest in strategies that promote growth, e.g. marketing campaigns, new hires and so forth. In terms of OpEx, cloud ERP enables people to work more productively, using automated workflows to speed up business processes. The connected nature of the extended Acumatica system reduces manual process steps and re-keying of data into the solution.

The ERP toolset provides for improved scheduling of production operations and field service. With data analytics and visual dashboards, the ERP solution can help managers anticipate problems and react before they become expensive to solve. Advanced inventory management features give you the ability to conserve cash and cut down on costly mistakes like stocking merchandise for so long that it expires.

Protect Your Business, So It Can Grow

The last few years have demonstrated conclusively that a cyberattack is a costly distraction that then results in a huge remediation expense. A serious data breach, for instance, will probably put a damper on your growth plans for a good six months or more. ERP software does not guarantee security, however, modern cloud ERP solutions offer a number of security advantages compared to legacy systems. For instance, the system runs in a highly secure data center. The cloud architecture also makes possible a level of redundancy that protects you from outages resulting from attacks.

2020 promises to be a year of growth. ERP can be part of your success story. If you want to learn more about how cloud ERP can help your business grow in the coming year, let’s talk.

Additional ERP Resources

7 Important Qualities of Cloud ERP

Position Your Business for Growth in 2020 With Cloud ERP

7 Benefits of CRM Software (That’s Integrated with ERP)

Recommendations for Selecting a Distribution ERP Solution

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What is the right ERP solution for your distribution business? Acumatica Cloud ERP has created an in-depth checklist to help you understand your options. Their hope, of course, is that you choose Acumatica, but the reality is they’ve done everyone a service by publishing the checklist. You could work through it and conclude that a different solution is right for your particular distribution business—especially as the industry undergoes a period of digital transformation.

The checklist is also a good reflection of the way we work with clients in discovering the best solution for their distribution businesses. It’s methodical and allows for the prioritization of needs. With ERP selection, it should never be a simple matter of feature-to-feature comparison. The best practice is to weight features by relevance to your business.

Overview of the Distribution ERP Selection Checklist

The checklist contains five categories of comparison for distribution ERP solutions:

  • Productivity—How a distribution ERP solution can make your employees more productive in their jobs
  • Functionality—The specific features and functions of the solution
  • Technology—The underlying technology that affects user experience, customization and administration along with integration with other systems, e.g. logistics, HR and so forth
  • Value—How the product maximizes features and functions vs. cost for the product’s lifetime
  • Risk—How the product minimizes risk and facilitates security (e.g. network and financial security)

Using the Checklist to Select a Distribution ERP Solution

Depending on your business, you may emphasize some of the five categories more than others. Productivity, for example, is often overlooked, but it shouldn’t be. The checklist forces you to take a hard look at issues like how intuitive the interface is for users. If it’s not easy to learn, people might find ways to work around it, defeating the whole purpose of the solution. Other productivity factors include having a single database, multi-currency capabilities, wikis and so forth.

Functionality is a critical area for evaluation. Even if you totally love a distribution ERP solution, if it doesn’t do what you want, the solution won’t work. Functional check-offs span features like support for multiple entities, financial management and quote-to-cash workflows. Sales order management and cost accounting are on the list, as are purchase order management and inventory management.

In terms of technology, the checklist encourages you to probe whether a cloud-based solution is “True Cloud,” meaning that it was designed natively for the cloud. This can make a difference in how well the solution works and how easy it is to change. Responsive design is also a significant requirement, given today’s mobile workforce and customers. Other technical issues of note include database export capabilities and the presence of a full relational database. This latter technical feature can be important for integration with other systems, audits and more. The value checklist items refer to financial aspects of the solution. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) figures prominently into the value category, but so do non-monetary but value-oriented factors like scalability.

If you’re considering getting a new distribution ERP solution, we encourage you to work with the checklist. We can help you go through it, looking at how your business runs and how it competes to arrive at an informed, wise solution choice.

Additional Distribution Resources

Looking at 2020 Distribution Industry Trends with ERP in Mind

Benefits of ERP Software for Distribution Business Management

5 Reasons Distributors Need ERP Software

Position Your Business for Growth in 2020 With Cloud ERP

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Will 2020 be a year of growth for your business? While it’s impossible to predict the future, one can still explore how new technology and practices can position your business for growth as we enter this new decade. Cloud ERP in particular, like Acumatica, can make a big difference in a company’s growth trajectory.

How Does Software Enable Growth?

Can software drive growth? No, on its own, software cannot do very much. However, when people, strategy and processes join forces with flexible, powerful cloud ERP solutions, the potential for growth can be startling.

What is cloud ERP? Briefly, solutions like Acumatica are browser-based versions of the classic Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications. Yet, they go much further than legacy ERP. Acumatica, for example, offers add-on modules for manufacturing management, distribution businesses, field service, Customer Resource management (CRM) and more. It’s a complete business management solution, not just ERP. It’s cloud-based, so you don’t have to buy hardware or software licenses to use it.

Here are five ways cloud ERP, used in the right way, can facilitate revenue and earnings increases:

1. Save money and invest in your business

Cloud ERP saves you money on operating expenses (OpEx) by way of reduced IT overhead. You can cut capital expenses (CapEx) because you don’t have to tie up cash or take on debt for servers, storage and data center facilities. You can redeploy that capital, investing in new lines of business, marketing campaigns, money-making equipment and so forth.

2. Get closer to your customers and grow your accounts

With CRM and quote-to-order tools, you can grow your business by improving customer engagement. CRM gives you an overview of sales forecasts as well as the ability to dig deeply into the sales status of specific accounts. With CRM, you can also engage in meaningful marketing campaigns that turn prospects into customers and nurture existing customers so you’ll be top of mind when it’s time to buy. Learn more about integrating ERP and CRM.

3. Improve customer service

When you connect customer service, operations and sales using cloud ERP, you have the ability to deliver a consistent, high-quality customer experience. Customers who are well-cared-for tend to become repeat customers. Having a lower rate of customer churn makes it easier to increase revenue. You don’t have to replace customers who defected due to sub-optimal customer care.

4. Be more agile

Cloud hosting translates into flexibility of ERP solutions. Cloud ERP can add functional modules with relative ease. That way, if you want to make a move like adding 24-hour a day live customer support, you can add the software for the capability pretty much instantly. Similarly, if you want to extend your systems and integrate with those of other companies like suppliers or partners, the cloud Application Programming Interface (API) make as this a fairly straightforward, inexpensive and fast process. It’s certainly far simpler than using custom-coded connectors in legacy ERP solutions.

5. Get smarter by running analytics on your data

Your business data contains a wealth of potential insights that can help you grow your business. Modern cloud ERP makes this data available, with rich data visualization, analysis and reporting features.

Grow in 2020 and Beyond With Cloud ERP

Cloud ERP can help you start 2020 on a growth trajectory. You can get started now, working with us to understand your ERP requirements and formulate an effective implementation plan.

5 Reasons Managed Services Are Good For Your Business

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Every investment in information technology has as its ultimate goal to help the business operate more effectively, efficiently, and to help the business grow and succeed. That’s true when you invest in managed services, as well—it isn’t just about helping out your overstretched technology team. If you’re evaluating that investment, consider these 5 ways managed services benefit your business:

1. Focus on business

Because your managed services provider handles your technology, you can focus on what really matters to your business rather than stressing over how IT is getting in the way. This is true for your IT employees, too; rather than solving routine technical problems, they can leverage both their technical insight and their business knowledge to develop new ways to use technology that align with your overall business objectives. In addition, the support offered by the managed services provider can scale with your needs, meaning growing business won’t be hindered by a lack of IT support.

2. Cost management

Reducing IT spending without reducing the quality of your technology means you can invest those funds elsewhere. Managed services provide you with predictable expenses for IT services and support.

3. Increased productivity

With a managed services team looking after your technology, you’ll get more uptime, meaning your employees will be able to complete their work more efficiently. A managed services provider can keep an eye on your systems 365x24x7, meaning the systems are always available for employees to use.

4. Meet compliance requirements

Keeping current with changing compliance requirements is time-consuming; satisfying audits is a distraction from running your business. With a managed services team that’s fully up to date on your industry’s regulatory environment, your technology is kept compliant, making you more likely to easily pass audits.

5. Reduced security risks

Information security presents an ever-increasing risk to your business. Customer expectations are increasing, their tolerance for breaches is diminishing, and new data privacy laws make incidents extremely costly for businesses. In addition to thefts of customer data, thefts of intellectual property can have a direct impact on your business’s level of competitiveness. A managed services provider can focus on implementing security tools and processes that decrease the risks to your business.

Choosing the Right Managed Services Provider

Choosing the right managed services provider requires first understanding your requirements and then finding a provider whose capabilities match those needs. Be sure you understand how resources will be assigned to you, and how you will be charged and billed. Contact CCS Technology Group to learn more about how our managed services can help your business succeed.

Additional Managed Services Resources

How Managed Services Make the Difference

Give Your Managed Services Provider This Information If You Want Them to Succeed

Whatever Your IT Problem, There’s a Managed Services Solution

Don’t Overlook These Aspects When You Plan Your Cloud Migration

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Planning for the cloud requires taking a comprehensive look at your infrastructure. There’s more to consider than simply migrating data and applications.

Network

The network is perhaps the forgotten component of the cloud, but it’s essential to success in the cloud. Making sure the network can handle the new traffic demands of your cloud architecture is vital to a successful cloud deployment.

Be sure you estimate the bandwidth requirements when you switch to SaaS or move data storage to the cloud. The network needs to meet both capacity and latency requirements.

Security

The network is closely tied with another aspect of infrastructure that’s affected by the move to cloud: security. Your firewall rules need to be adjusted to allow appropriate communication with your cloud infrastructure.

In addition, you need to thoroughly revisit your security strategy. Understand which aspects are handled by your cloud provider, so you can focus your attention on the aspects which are still your responsibility. In particular, focus on ensuring your cloud resources have appropriate configuration settings—the defaults may make data publicly accessible, along with identity and access management. You’ll also want to make certain data is encrypted and have a process for managing the encryption keys.

Learn more in 6 Ways to Keep Your Cloud More Secure.

Monitoring

Although the cloud provider has responsibility for the infrastructure, you still need to need to monitor your workloads to ensure they’re performing appropriately. Cloud providers offer tools for monitoring, and you can also consider third-party monitoring tools. Ideally, your cloud monitoring tool will integrate with your on-premises monitoring so there’s a single screen that reports your total system status. Whatever monitoring you use, your employees need to be trained in how to respond to outages and other problems in the cloud.

Backup & Recovery

Cloud providers include backups that let them recover your systems to another instance in case of a problem, but their backup strategy might not mesh with your data preservation requirements. In addition to potentially losing more intraday data than your recovery objective requires, they don’t create an archive of historic data that you may need for compliance or analytics purposes.

In some cases, responding to an outage requires recovering services elsewhere—despite the high availability that comes with cloud, you still need a backup and recovery solution. This may mean failing over to another region managed by the same provider or failing over to a different cloud provider or on-premises environment.

Learn more about the different cloud options for backup and recovery.

Cloud Migration

Both you and your cloud provider hope the cloud migration will be successful. However, it’s prudent to plan for migrating out of the cloud if the provider can no longer meet your needs. While you don’t need a full-fledged out-migration strategy on the day you switch production over to the cloud, you should have at least investigated it to become aware of the potential costs of data transfers out of the cloud.

CCS Technology Group can help you address all aspects of your cloud planning, as well as provide ongoing cloud services once your cloud migration is complete. Contact us to learn more about successfully transitioning to the cloud.

7 Benefits of CRM Software (That’s Integrated with ERP)

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Everyone knows that “The customer is always right.” However, in a lot of businesses, there are two big difficulties with this piece of wisdom: They don’t know quite who their customers are and they may not have a good feel for what the customer wants or thinks. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions offer a way to stay in touch with customers and keep them engaged for ongoing revenue growth.

These solutions, which started out as glorified digital rolodexes, now enable highly sophisticated sales forecasting capabilities, customer support, and marketing management. They also integrate with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions—potentially giving everyone in the business a clear picture of the customer at any given point in time. With that in mind, here are 7 benefits of adopting CRM, especially when it’s integrated with ERP:

1. Improve customer relationships

This sounds pretty basic, but it’s one of the most important elements of a growing business. CRM gives your team the tools to be in touch with key accounts and stay engaged with them as their needs evolve. With CRM, you can instantly get a complete view of the customer, including proposals and orders in progress, new leads within accounts, customer service history and more.

2. Manage sales more effectively

CRM gives sales managers a total overview of customer accounts. Sales reps can use the CRM solution to create opportunities and build sales forecasts, one customer at a time. CRM creates accountability in the sales team, with the potential to drive revenue growth.

3. Understand the effectiveness of marketing campaigns

CRM solutions usually have marketing campaign execution capabilities, though in many cases, separate marketing systems integrate into CRM. Either way, marketing and sales managers can use CRM to track which marketing initiatives are creating sales prospects. And, of these prospects, which become accounts. Thus, CRM offers a way to show Return on Investment (ROI) for marketing campaigns. It measure how well marketing money is being spent.

4. Establish and maintain customer master data

Customer data, especially for accounts with multiple locations and contacts, can easily get disaggregated. With duplicates and missing data, customer data management and communication suffers. CRM gives your company a standard master data record for each customer.

5. Grow sales with quote-to-order capabilities

CRM, when connected to ERP and outfitted with quote-to-order functionality, lets all relevant stakeholders in the sales and order delivery process to know exactly how a particular customer relationship is doing with regard to orders. You can also keep customers in the loop on issues with quotes, e.g. delays in the supply chain that might affect an order.

6. Get better at upselling and cross-selling

With CRM, sales team members can be given suggestions on cross-sell and upsell, e.g. adding a service contract to sale of a product. Sales managers can also then track how well reps are doing at cross-sell and upselling.

7. Deliver better customer service

The customer support module is often activated when companies deploy CRM. Doing so provides mutual visibility between sales and support, which can be helpful in maintaining good customer relationships. For example, if customer support gets a seemingly minor issue from a customer, they can see on CRM that it’s a multi-million dollar account, so it deserves a high priority. Or, if a sales rep is calling on an account, he or she can use CRM to see existing support tickets.

We have worked with many companies on the implementation of CRM solutions, both on a standalone basis and as part of an extended ERP system. To learn more about CRM or see a demo, please visit our CRM page.

Additional CRM Resources

Which CRM solution is right for your organization?

4 ways a CRM helps you improve customer relationships

3 different approaches to CRM systems

Take These Steps to Avoid Expensive Ransomware Recovery Costs

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Recovering from ransomware has cost affected entities millions of dollars—Baltimore spent more than $18 million to bring systems back to their normal state. To avoid budget-crushing costs, it’s imperative to defend against attacks and have a plan for responding to incidents.

Understand the Scope of the Needed Defenses

There isn’t a single measure you can take that will be effective against all ransomware, any more than there’s a single measure that will block all other kinds of malware. Defending against ransomware begins by understanding that defenses need to be widespread. Do a review of your data to identify the most vulnerable and most valuable so you can focus your efforts where you’ll gain the most benefit. Similarly, conduct a review of your network architecture to ensure the most important applications are isolated from the wider network.

Get Your Backups Ready

You can prevent some files from being corrupted by ransomware by setting filesystem permissions, but restoring from backups is often the only way possible to recover from a ransomware attack. It’s crucial that you ensure your backup procedures work. Make sure your backup scripts cover all critical systems, and run a test to ensure you know how to correctly restore a server. Keep a copy of the backup that isn’t connected to networked devices in order to prevent ransomware from accessing the storage.

Learn more in Don’t Lose Your Files to Ransomware.

Block Dangerous Software from the Network

If you can keep ransomware out of your network, you’ll never have to attempt to restore from backup. If you’re behind on installing patches, catch up now, and put a process in place to keep you up to date. Ensure firewalls, blacklists, and mail server filters prevent potentially risky files from reaching end users.

Protect User Devices

Take steps to prevent ransomware from spreading and limit the number of affected files if it reaches user devices. Turn off file sharing and disable Windows PowerShell and Windows Script Host. In Microsoft Office, disable macros. Ensure antivirus software is installed and do scheduled full scans. Don’t allow applications to run from App Data folders.

Train Users

Your users are your final backstop against attacks on your network. Train them on good computing practices in general, including recognizing and avoiding phishing attacks. Make sure users know who to contact in case of any suspicious email contacts. Users should know how to disconnect their device from the network and be taught to do so in case of a suspected ransomware incident. Learn more about creating an information security culture.

Ransomware is just one of the many cybersecurity threats businesses need to defend against. It’s important to develop a comprehensive, multilayered security strategy that offers comprehensive protection. Contact CCS Technology Group to learn about how our security services offer protection against ransomware and other information security threats.

If you’re serious about protecting your company – and you should be – there’s a two-pronged approach that will stop most ransomware dead in its tracks. You need solid employee education, and you need the right technical tools.
To find out how, download our guide: Ransomware 101 Guide.

Additional Information Security Resources

Discover the Dangers of the Dark Web

The Key Features to Look for In Your Firewall

6 Ways to Keep Your Cloud Secure

New Year, New Cloud Choices and Challenges

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The new year brings new technology capabilities and new technology challenges. Here are some cloud challenges and choices you should be prepared for in 2020:

Multicloud and hybrid cloud become strategic decisions

Although adopting cloud was a difficult choice for many businesses, today cloud is an almost automatic decision. Because many businesses started small with cloud, their IT infrastructure is often a hybrid IT mix of cloud and on premises systems. Because many departments adopted cloud independently, their IT infrastructure is often a mix of different cloud vendors. Up until now, those mixtures of technology have often been the unintentional result of separate decisions. In order to get the most benefit from cloud, hybrid IT and multicloud architectures need to become strategic choices, evaluated for how they can integrate and work together to deliver the IT capabilities the business needs.

Learn more in What it Takes to Succeed at Cloud.

Cloud security is a business priority

When cloud was first introduced, many were hesitant to use it because of concerns about data security. After it became clear that cloud security is often better than on premises security, many businesses began to rely on their cloud provider for data security. But businesses need to recognize that the data security implemented by the cloud provider does not provide a complete data security solution that meets business needs and multiple cloud solutions can mean inconsistent, incomplete security controls. Businesses need to make their own efforts to ensure data is properly protected in the cloud.

Learn more in 6 Ways to Keep Your Cloud Secure.

Having a cloud in your data center is a viable, defensible technology architecture

After deciding you want a cloud, you have to decide where you want it. This is no longer simply a matter of choosing your public cloud vendor. Private clouds are getting easier to implement, with tools such as Microsoft Azure Stack making it simpler to build a private cloud on premises. Security considerations as well as concerns about growing public cloud costs mean a private cloud deserves serious consideration.

Build workloads with portability in mind

The multicloud approach means there’s a need to move workloads between providers; the need to avoid cloud vendor lock-in also creates portability concerns. To achieve this, businesses need to balance the benefits of proprietary libraries and APIs against the portability concern. Technology teams need to leverage containers and other technology to make deploying on multiple platforms easier.

Because of the complexities of cloud, it’s always a good idea to get help from an experienced partner. Contact CCS Technology Group to learn how our cloud services can help you get the most out of your cloud in 2020.