Is Your Cyber Security Capable of Protecting Your Business in the COVID-19 Era?

Data is the most valuable commodity of any business. Over the last decade, digital services have grown to become one of the most important ways that enterprises engage with their consumers, coordinate their operations and plan for the future, and this has created a reliance on data. The pace of change shows no signs of slowing down, and maturing technologies such as artificial intelligence look set to disrupt a wide range of industries.

Managing and securing this data was already a significant problem, and COVID-19 is making it even more challenging. Businesses face a sudden requirement to deploy a home working infrastructure for thousands of workers, many of whom will not return to permanent office working again. Change on this scale is difficult to manage safely, which makes it a cyber-attacker’s dream scenario—and any gaps in data security will present a great opportunity for them to seize control.

Trusted Platform, New Risks

Businesses around the world rely on IBM Power Systems servers to support their most critical business systems, and for good reason. The IBM i and AIX operating systems have a long-standing reputation for rock-solid security and offer a wide range of capabilities to help business harden their environments and mitigate the risk of breaches.

However, the platforms themselves can only guarantee security up to a point—there are many aspects of security management that technology alone can’t solve. In particular, companies with on-premises infrastructure should carefully consider whether existing approaches to cyber security are still fit for purpose in the COVID-19 era.

Many companies have robust cyber resiliency policies that spring into action in the event of a successful attack. These policies can be extremely detailed, specifying the actions that should be taken in the event of a breach, the responsibilities of each team, and service-level objectives for completing the recovery.

However, it’s no longer enough to spring into action after an attack has been successful—you need to be more proactive and prevent breaches from occurring in the first place. In a post-COVID-19 world, where the default is for your workforce to access systems remotely, you need to consider whether your existing security policies are still fit for purpose.

Gain Peace of Mind with Meridian Power Cloud

If your business relies on an on-premises IBM Power Systems environment to support critical workloads, there’s never been a better time to move to the Meridian Power Cloud. Our cloud offering gives you access to our Power Watch cyber security services, which represent the most formidable defence of the Power platform and its data. By proactively monitoring all attempts to access your systems, Power Watch enables you to shift to a remote working model without compromising on IT security.

In addition to its security advantages, moving to the Meridian Power Cloud will also remove the need for significant capital spend on hardware refreshes and maintenance, and reduce the cost and complexity of maintaining IBM i and AIX skills in house. By outsourcing the day-to-day management and security monitoring of your Power environment to us as a trusted IBM Platinum Business Partner, you can liberate your IT team to focus on what they do best—developing value-added services for the business and your customers.

Meridian has been delivering data security solutions for more than 20 years and has the deep security expertise to protect your digital services from would-be cyber-attackers. With the Meridian Power Cloud, you can move your IBM i or AIX workloads to a proven, global platform trusted by hundreds of businesses in the UK and around the world. And with our dedicated Security Operations Centre, you’ll gain the peace of mind that your information security and data governance policies are enforced 24/7.