Is your IT infrastructure Secure, Usable, Reliable, and Extendable? (S.U.R.E)
Morgan Cyber. Reading time 4.5 mins
“Morgan Cyber spends more time resolving IT issues caused by not appropriately reviewing or updating technologies, than are caused by cyber-attacks”.
Adina Blaj – Co-Founder Morgan Cyber
While cyber-attacks take the headlines, common root causes of IT failures are often much closer to home, and can be avoided through simple, future focused IT infrastructure planning.
To remain competitive, commercial organisations need to invest in and be ambitious with their future digital visions. Whether the goal is to transform the customer experience through a new application, or to increase operational efficiency by moving infrastructure to the cloud, a lack of innovation here will leave you behind.
However, it is essential this digital vision can be supported by your IT infrastructure. If your IT infrastructure can’t (in its current state) support this vision, you will be writing cheques that simply cannot be cashed. You may even find yourself in a worse position than when you started.
Being proactive and including regular IT Infrastructure Reviews as part of the planning process will make remediation faster, easier, and cheaper than if you stumble into unforeseen issues during a major project.
Approaching an IT Infrastructure Review
There are four common denominators that well-managed IT infrastructures share, they are all: secure, usable, reliable, and extendable, or SURE for short. If these four key elements are all working to their true potential, your teams are likely doing a great job.
SECURE:
- Is your infrastructure designed from the ground up to make life as difficult as possible for cyber attackers?
USABLE:
- Can your teams execute their day-to-day tasks and access / share information easily, or are your password managers and zero trust architecture actually inhibiting productivity?
RELIABLE:
- Do you have the scaling, load balancing, performance monitoring, and failsafe’s in place to deliver high performing IT infrastructure day in, day out, without costly and frustrating maintenance periods
EXTENDABLE:
- Is your infrastructure designed to grow with your business without demanding new investment?
Why IT Infrastructure Reviews are often overlooked
In our experience, it is often because there is either not the expertise or time available in house to conduct one, or because it simply does not occur to non-IT teams running major projects to ask if the extra demands they will be putting on IT infrastructure are actually achievable. In both scenarios the end result is the organisation stumbling into issues that were avoidable.
How long does an IT Infrastructure Review take?
The short answer is not long. A review on a specific device within your existing infrastructure may only take a couple of days, while a full-scale review of a whole years planned projects can often be achieved within a couple of weeks. After a single scoping call, Morgan Cyber will be able to give you an accurate time frame and cost.
It is important to also leave time for remediation. But from our experience, because you are being proactive and identifying potential issues before they become real ones, in a vast majority of cases remediation will not take much longer than the review itself.
What does an IT Infrastructure Review entail?
Morgan Cyber can assess everything, from a single specific device, right through to your entire IT infrastructure against your digital vision, using our Secure, Usable, Reliable, and Expandable (SURE) model.
This is best illustrated using a recent example where a client’s vision was to improve their remote working capabilities to accommodate growing staff numbers in light of exciting growth.
Issues to be addressed included the significant expansion of their potential attack surface, how to authenticate access in a user-friendly way, and ensure maximum network reliability. Our SURE model was deployed to help them.
Security:
Data Protection
- Implement end-to-end encryption for data in transit
- Enforce data-at-rest encryption on endpoint devices and cloud storage
- Use Data Loss Prevention tools to prevent unauthorised data sharing
Controls
- Enforce multi-factor authentication
- Deploy zero-trust architecture to authenticate and authorise access requests
- Implement role-based access controls and least-privilege principles
Endpoint Security
- Deploy mobile device management or endpoint detection and response tooling
- Ensure devices have up-to-date antivirus, firewalls, and patch management.
Monitoring and Auditing
- Use SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) or other tooling to monitor anomalies
- Log all access and changes to sensitive systems.
Usability:
The user experience had to be seamless and intuitive, especially for non-technical staff.
User Experience (UX)
- Provide single sign-on (SSO) for commonly used apps
Accessibility
- Ensure systems were accessible for users with disabilities
- Supported a variety of devices (both company owned and BYOD)
Collaboration Tools
- Ensure collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack integrate with each other to support productivity
Reliability:
Ensure the network functioned smoothly and was able to recover quickly from faults
Infrastructure Resilience
- Leverage redundant servers, load balancing, and failover mechanisms
- Use cloud-based services with SLAs to meet uptime requirements
Backup and Recovery
- Regularly test backup procedures
- Implement disaster recovery plans specific to remote working scenarios such as cloud outages
Network Availability
- Ensure high availability of gateways required for remote access systems
Monitor network health to detect bottlenecks or outages early
Expansion:
Make sure growth in terms of users and usage would be achieved without significant performance degradation
Elastic Infrastructure
- Identify the right cloud-native services (e.g. AWS / Azure) that could auto-scale based on demand.
- Implement containerisation for efficient resource management and sharing
Remote Access Capacity
- Ensure their SASE solution secured not only their remote workforce but also the growing outsourced business support functions such as customer service
Use the SURE model to build confidence in your future plans
Through Morgan Cybers’ SURE model, organisations get a simple, future focused assessment of the gaps that exist between what they want to achieve in the digital space in the next 12 months, and what their existing IT infrastructure can deliver.
Like any assurance service, it may simply provide just that; reassurance that you are working with the tools that can best support you with what you want to achieve. On the other hand, it could also save you considerable time and cost, as finding out you cannot deliver what is required after a project has started is a horrible (and now thanks to SURE, avoidable) position to be in.
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