Introducing your IT Score to your monthly reports

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Introducing your IT Score to your monthly reports

Hi all,

 

As I mentioned in last month’s report, I attended the 2019 AusCERT cyber-security conference where we learnt about current initiatives to help protect your staff and business data.

 

It made us reflect on our current reporting, in particular, your monthly “traffic light” IT report. When we first developed that report, our intention was to easily highlight the key areas in your IT environment that need your attention.

 

When we started generating these reports in 2011, it was focused on hardware and servers. A lot has changed since then. Security is now far more important and this, tied with the dominance of the cloud, has pushed the importance of hardware down the list.

 

So taking our learnings from AusCERT and this new world order, we’ve redeveloped your monthly IT report. Here are the key differences you will notice:

  • Your IT Score: Starting this month, we’ve introduced a single number that lets you know how close you are to providing the best possible environment for your staff in regard to security, stability and compliance. We’ve weighted all 18 categories in order of importance because not all categories are equal when it comes to providing a best practice IT environment.

  • Essential Eight: The Australian Signals Directorate has 8 key cyber-security strategies to increase your cyber resilience. The previous version of the report had 5 of the 8, but now we’ve included all 8.

  • Daily Backups: Backups were always included, but we have a stricter definition in place now. To receive a full score (green light) backups must be automated (no manual changing of drives/tapes), securely stored in the cloud, and also, all cloud services need to be backed-up.

  • User Training: We’ve now included cyber resilience training for your team. This training, conducted onsite, takes your team through how to detect possible scams, fraudulent messages and phishing attempts.

 

Here are the categories we test to give you your business’ IT score.

  • Clean up: We’ve also combined and removed some categories. For example, we now have 1 category for operating system patching to cover both servers and workstations. We’ve removed certificates from the report because, in this day and age, certificates are important but are also freely available and easily installed.

  • New look: To coincide with the new report, we’ve also updated the look and feel. We have all new icons for each category and a summary page so you can see what needs attention in a single view. The summary page and the full report is also ordered from most important, so you know where to direct us to focus our energy.

 

Our goal as the steward for your IT environment is to reduce the red and increase that score. Check your score today!

 

Categories we test to give you your IT score

About the author

Yener is the founder and Managing Director of Intuitive IT. Prior to running his own business Yener worked for a number of corporate organisations where he gained invaluable experience and skills, as well as an understanding of how IT can complement and improve business outcomes.