Complete Cloud Technology Roadmap with 5 Functions

Do you need a Complete Cloud Technology Roadmap for your small business?  Do you wonder how your small business can increase security and enhance productivity?  In this blog post and those to follow, we’ll go through a full blueprint for a complete technology roadmap.

Just to set the perspective it seems from our experience businesses without a strategic technology plan end up spending more which hurts the bottom-line.  Two major benefits of developing a strategic technology plan for your small business in the beginning:

• Reduction in operational costs
• Eliminate or reduce migration costs

This technology roadmap is based on 5 key strategic functions with a cloud solution at the core.  If your small business establishes these 5 functions, you can weather any potential technology disruption.  As we review these 5 functions, we’ll discuss security and productivity.

5 Key Functions for your Cloud Technology Roadmap

These 5 functions are based on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework version 1.1.  If you’d like to learn more about the standard, you can visit this link here.  Our goal below is to simplify and provide a vision of how to align your business with this strategy.  A focus on these five create a cybersecurity blueprint for your small business.

Identify

The very first step for all small business is to understand their assets.  What assets are at risk?  An asset consists of anything with value that needs to be protected.  Examples of an asset could be a physical device or product to a computer file, data or software program.  Understanding these components will help define your cloud technology roadmap.

Also, it is important to understand the business environment.  How does your small business’s mission, objectives and activities relate to cybersecurity roles, responsibilities and risk management decisions in the market place today.  Due to the nature of your business, there could be compliance activities that need to be followed.

The next step within identify is governance which is a collection of the polices, procedures and processes to manage and monitor your business regulatory, legal, environmental and operational requirements.

Based on the first three your business understands the cybersecurity risk to organizational operations, assets and individuals.  Then implement a management strategy to address priorities, risk tolerances and assumptions.  Some risks can be

Technology doesn’t solve this whole function.  However, if you start with Microsoft 365 Business Premium, many of the features and functionality of this cloud solution are built in.  Not only that, SharePoint within the Microsoft 365 Business solution can be used as a library for your policies and procedures that will need to be documented.

Protect

The primary focus of this function is to only allow authorized users, processes or devices to access assets and associated facilities.  Again as for this function as well, technology isn’t the only thing that helps protect your small business environment.  The non technical solution here is awareness training.  Employees are the weakest link when it comes to cybersecurity.

Microsoft 365 Business Premium provides a great foundation to your cloud technology roadmap with a layered approach to give your small business a great foundation to build on.  There are many different solutions on the market today for awareness training.  However, the most effective awareness training is content internally created and shared.  This content can be videos hosted within Microsoft 365 Business Premium using SharePoint and Stream.

Detect

The importance of this function is detect anomalous activity in a timely manner and the potential impact of events.  Think of smoke detectors, fire alarms and fire extinguishers, you business probably already contains a plan for those.

Depending on your environment and your risk tolerance will depend on the level of detection solution that need to be put in place.  Microsoft 365 Business Premium does provide some detection alerts and monitoring.  One of the key monitoring abilities is to monitor Risky Sign-ins within Microsoft Azure AD.

Cloudz Biz augments this service with additional tools and alerts depending on your environment and needs which will be discovered during the process of developing your cloud technology roadmap.

Respond

This is about your reaction when a cybersecurity event happen.  No matter the size what process do you follow from communication to analysis and mitigation.  There needs to be a plan outlined on how your business will respond.  When an attacker enters your environment, you want to act quickly, not figure it out.

Cloudz Biz assists with the procedures and processes on how to respond so that in the event of a cybersecurity event.  We bring the expertise to analyze and improve the environment from past events.

Recover

Recover is much like Respond.  You need a plan to follow in order to get back to normal.  Depending on the breach and the extent who needs to be notified.  If you have cyber liability insurance, did you follow the steps to submit a claim for the insurance.  Is the insurance required?

Some businesses do not recover from a major cyber security event due to financial loss and tarnished reputation.  Consider building a recovery plan ahead of time that takes both of those aspects into consideration.  A good plan will help through these times.

Next steps for your Small Business

Hope these thoughts help you in your business journey to be more security and resilient in the digital world we live in today.  To help understand your cloud technology roadmap, we recommend your next step to be a risk and vulnerability assessment with Cloudz Biz.

Check out what we offer in our Risk and Vulnerability Assessment Service:

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