Podcast 3: Multi-layered IT Security

02/03/2020

Welcome to our new podcast 'NCI Techcast' where we discuss the latest IT news and views that all small to medium businesses need to know!

Hosted by NCI Technologies' marketing and tech gurus, Joanna Williams and James Scott. Tune in for a discussion on all things business and tech with a side order of humour and informality. We're trying our best to make IT exciting and a bit less blah!

Moving on from our second episode our third podcast focuses on the technical IT security practices you can put into place in the workplace to protect your organisation from cybercrime. Click below to tune in to hear more and if you really love us give us a follow on Spotify!

In this episode your will find

0.01 - Welcome to NCI Techcast

1.00 - Multi-layered IT security for small to medium businesses

2.10 - Anti-virus

2.28 - Firewall

3.06 - Web Filtering

3.17 - DNS Filtering

3.43 - Backup and Disaster Recovery

5.02 - Email Security

6.26 - Business Continuity Plans

7.04 - Thanks for Joining the NCI Techcast

A short transcript of the show is just a brief scroll down the page.

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Podcast Transcript

Joanna: Hi James and welcome to the NCI Techcast, thanks for joining me.

James: Hi Joanna, it is great to be back again.

Joanna: So, last episode we discussed how winning the fight against cybercrime in the work place comes from having a good company culture focused on people-centric IT security. This said what are the technical IT security elements that small businesses should be looking at?

James: I am going to get a little technical with the answer to this. What you need is a multi-layered strategic IT security approach. What this really means is that we are not relying on a single product or technology or single person to do one job. We have multiple things doing a job, this means that if one system misses something then there is another layer to try and catch what it may have missed. This is a very logical way of working, however, this is not always appreciated in the business world as it can be seen as spending money twice. The sorts of things that we are looking at in our multi-layered approach is antivirus. This will sit on your PC doing antivirus things, scanning files, looking for threats. But in a multi-layered approach, we would have a firewall at your network's gateway. This is the point between your network and the internet. This firewall will also be running an anti-virus and be checking all the traffic entering your network to make sure that you are not bringing anything in. Another example of this might be web filtering. This may be done on your gateway firewall but will also be complemented by a DNS filter. This works by the DNS service blocking access to the websites you don’t want users to access, but anything that is not blocked by the DNS service is blocked by the firewall.

Joanna: Ok, so they are all working together.

James: Exactly! And the most important part of your multi-layered approach is having decent backups. Here at NCI we have an awesome product called our Backup and Disaster Recovery Server and this is your final saving grace. It will back up your servers every 15 mins, should something get through your multi-layered approach you have the ability to restore should it all go horribly wrong.

Joanna: How long would a restore normally take?

James: It very much depends on what you are trying to restore, the number of servers and the amount of data. But the way that we use our BDRs is that we can spin up any of those 15 min backups on a virtual server. It can take as little as an hour to have you back up and running.

Joanna: That is good to know.

Joanna: Should we also be looking at email security?

James: Email security is another way of stopping things getting in to your network. If you are using Office 365 for example, that has malware and anti-virus filters built in. It also has scanning technologies built in to it to stop a lot of the click bait links that come through. If it gets through this it then has to get through your firewall. This may be doing your anti-virus and link scanning and finally it has to get through your anti-virus on your computer. The more layers you put in place the less likely things are to get through.

It’s worth discussing business continuity plans also. So, every business should have a business continuity plan. It’s a disaster plan, it’s what happens if something goes wrong. Lots of businesses have these in place if there was a fire or flood but many people neglect to include things like if there was Malware in their network or they got Cryptolockered. I’m more than happy for people to contact me and discuss this also.

Joanna: A big thank you to James for his input and views today and a thanks to our listeners for joining us for our podcast. If you have any feedback or any topic suggestions email us at info@ncitech.co.uk. Don’t forget to tune in to our next edition of the NCI Techcast where we will be discussing all things business IT. Until then Techcast fans!

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