KennethKeeping Manufacturing Assets Safe in the Cloud
In the manufacturing industry, there are two main priorities for protecting your data: cloud security and disaster recovery. The beginning of 2019 is a great time to evaluate your current situation and conduct an overall analysis - How secure is your data? How prepared are you for a targeted security attack? What is your process for handling power outages?
Why Are Manufacturing Companies Particularly Susceptible to Cyber Attacks?
In the age of targeted security attacks, manufacturers need to have steps in place to mitigate the damage that can result from unauthorized access to data and/or security breaches. In particular, small and medium-sized manufacturing organizations are more susceptible to cyber attacks and data loss due to slow integration with new technology such as managed cloud solutions. As other industries have more quickly adapted to this new model of housing data, this leaves manufacturing companies as one of the few remaining industries that are considered low-hanging fruits as targets.
Historically, manufacturing companies have not been a big target for cybersecurity as they hadn’t housed particularly sensitive information. However, as that has changed over the years, cyber attacks have become more frequent in order to steal a companies’ intellectual property and/or to disrupt operations in order to cause loss of productivity and cause significant disruptions due to downtime.
How Can Managed Cloud Providers Keep Manufacturers Safe?
There are many benefits to utilizing a managed cloud service provider, but undoubtedly, some of the biggest benefits directly relate to security. A specific type of cloud service provider called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a business that allows for the utilization of both their cloud and personnel resources in order to support a businesses’ applications and overall corporate cloud environment. With both a knowledgeable team of experts and a secure infrastructure, manufacturing companies can rest assured that their data and performance are well taken care of.
What Type of Cloud Environment is Best for Manufacturing Companies?
When you meet with a cloud service provider such as Wowrack, it’s important that they fully understand the needs and goals of your company. Everything regarding the custom environment they present to you should specifically be built based on those needs, and reflect that through the implementation of certain security and compliance measures.
To that end, a managed private cloud or a managed hybrid cloud environment are the two most utilized infrastructures for manufacturing businesses. They contain a baseline level of security that is crucial for these organizations (such as network isolation) while allowing for certain customizations to seamlessly integrate with their existing processes. Private and hybrid cloud solutions, similarly, are scalable without providing a weak point for targeted attacks.
How Can Manufacturing Companies Prepare for Disaster Recovery?
While not necessarily initiated by people, outages can oftentimes occur - and when they do, the fallout that results could cause chaos for your organization. Having a team on-hand to respond to these incidents is mission-critical in avoiding loss of productivity, revenue, or even overall data. Unfortunately, many manufacturing businesses do not have the level of expertise in their IT teams to handle these disasters. Or, if expertise isn’t an issue, availability is.
It doesn’t take long for outages to cause large amounts of monetary loss, so an IT response team has to be ready to act at a moment’s notice. When utilizing a managed cloud service provider, your company receives the benefits of a dedicated team monitoring the status of critical systems such as:
- UPS
- Generators
- Multiple Network Carriers
- Redundant Cooling
- Data Center Security
Or, similarly, ensuring efficient use of time to focus on items that can provide disaster mitigation through the following tasks:
- Routine maintenance
- Troubleshooting
- Managing backups
- Updates/patches
- Management of the corporate cloud infrastructure
- Maintaining an up-to-date disaster recovery plan
- Executing a disaster recovery plan to reduce losses when necessary
Wowrack’s elite team ensures that not only are you covered 24/7/365 if an outage occurs, but that your servers are performing at optimal speed - thereby granting the ability to carry on your day-to-day with confidence, and at top performance levels.
Whether your manufacturing company is considering migrating to a corporate cloud environment, or if you would like to discuss adding to your current infrastructure, we provide free consultations in order to determine a custom plan of how we can meet your needs. Contact us today to learn more.
