1. Accountability
   
   Imagine being able to walk into work knowing your systems will be operational. Imagine opening a new rotating line of credit knowing that the borrower’s information will be secure. Imagine having a plan in place for business continuity when the power goes out and you still must treat patients. Imagine that responsibility being on the shoulders of an outsourced partner.
   When done correctly, adding an outsourced managed IT provider should alleviate your pain and concern. This partner should act as an extension of your team, and know not only your environment, but your goals as a company, your mission statement, and understand what must work to be operational and within regulatory compliance. Shifting accountability means when a computer goes down, we fix it. When a server needs upgrading, we upgrade it. When a malicious email enters your environment, we block it. When your end-users need the training to prevent ransomware or phishing, we provide it. When you shift accountability to a managed service provider, you are shifting the burden you are feeling to an expert who doesn’t see it as a burden. We see it as what we do best. And you get to sleep better at night.
   
   
2. Expertise
   
   Whether you are a rural bank or an attorney’s office in the middle of a thriving city, finding and maintaining talent can be nearly impossible. Think about your team. How many total employees do you have, not including your IT team? Divide your team by the number of IT employees on staff. If you have 100 employees and 2 internal IT, that means each IT employee is constantly responsible for the tier one issues of 50 employees. While those two employees are battling the tier one requests (my computer isn’t working, I need to reset a password, this program won’t open, my phone isn’t receiving calls), who is monitoring your servers? Who is creating and developing training to educate your employees on which emails are safe and which ones are disguised and are threats? Who is procuring your new servers or computers? Who is installing them? When you have a small internal team, your resources are limited. Adding an MSP not only shifts accountability but deepens the bench strength of your resources. When an MSP enters the picture, you now have separate teams working on projects for you simultaneously.
   
   
3. Efficiency
   
   What happens when you start checking in patients quicker and they get access to the healthcare needed faster? What happens when your bank successfully sends more wires than you ever have before? What happens when your environment is protected and your team is down for less time, experiences fewer technological obstacles, and customers receive a better experience? Your business thrives. When you partner with an MSP, you are no longer worrying about accountability, staffing internal IT, or checking all the boxes. Instead, you are focusing on the day-to-day tasks that allow you to achieve your mission. Efficiency is the product of the technology marrying process. When your environment is healthy, operational, and experiencing less down time, you are operating in a more efficient way which empowers you and your business to operate at new levels.
   
   If you have been contemplating adding an MSP, you should start by evaluating the statements below.
   
   1. Our environment is completely secure, backed up, and we are not at a threat of being hacked or breached.
   2. Our regulators would look at our technology and processes and approve them without a second thought.
   3. Our internal team can maintain all tier-one requests while also addressing our network security, our employee training, our warranty on equipment, our procurement, and our reporting.
   4. Our bank/hospital/office is running at 99.999% uptime and never experiences outages or issues.
   5. We have a firewall and email encryption in place that would proactively prevent a phishing email getting to a vulnerable recipient.
   6. We receive quarterly reports (or more frequent) on budget, the health of our environment, strategic goals, project updates, and support ticket evaluations.
   7. Our employees are trained on secure behaviors.
   8. Our technology is a competitive advantage over our competition
   
   If you have concerns over any of them, send us a message and let us help you see why an MSP could help I.T. stop being a four-letter word.

This is where multi-factor authentication can serve as another security control. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is a security system that verifies a user’s identity by requiring multiple credentials. Instead of just asking for a username and password, MFA requires that a user provides two separate types of authentication from these three categories:

• Something you are (fingerprint, facial recognition)
• Something you have (security card, mobile phone, iPad)
• Something you know (your password, passphrase, PIN)

MFA is typically set up to include the “something you know” (i.e. your username and password) with “something you have” (e.g. a one-time passcode from a device you own, such as your mobile phone).

In recent years, multi-factor authentication has become more common for personal use, and many online applications (Apple, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn) have adopted MFA processes.

As businesses need to lock down additional programs and applications to protect their data, it’s important they strongly consider adding a multi-factor authentication process to their IT security plan.

1. While antivirus, firewalls, and password management strategies are a component of your overall IT strategy, you still want to make it as difficult as possible for attackers to even log into your systems. They not only take data, but can hijack systems, alter programs or introduce malicious code. If someone had easy access to all your company’s key data, imagine how they could use it to hurt your business and your bottom line.

2. Password theft will continue to accelerate. Cybercriminals are constantly innovating new techniques to steal the keys to your company’s gate. Adding MFA requires that all user identities are verified before they can log into corporate applications.

3. Today, more and more people are working remotely but still need access to their files and company-wide information. Since accessing remote environments does not require someone to be onsite in order to gain access, adding MFA creates a second layer of security to ensure that whoever is accessing the remote resources are really who they claim to be.

With the increase of cyber attacks on businesses, password strength alone cannot be relied on as the only layer of protection. Multi-factor authentication is a proven way to stop 99.9% of automated attacks that would otherwise succeed by using a compromised or easily guessed password.