The RTA Tech Stack: Growing new businesses into mature businesses without skipping a beat…

Our experience transitioning companies through the start up curve and into a mature business, has always demanded careful and sensitive consulting around their systems and infrastructure development.

A business can only be as successful as its systems, and the systems reliability. We found the need to integrate MSP services ( Managed Service Provider Services) into our practice in order to offer our clients a secure and compliant environment.

Below is a list of our carefully selected partners that help safe guard our clients data everyday and a customized solutions we fee can help mitigate threats in the digital transformation.

You will also find a list of detailed questions we worked through when considering transitioning our clients and our systems in our blog. We feel that as important operations are, and accounting is, so is the need for security and redundancy.

Microsoft O365 Business Premium / Microsoft E5

Many businesses we work with have pieced together their productivity tools with free open sourced platforms. We advise that this is not best practice for a number of reasons but the main one include the organization is not operating behind a firewall. When working in the cloud, Microsoft’s security is unparrelled and ensures documents can be safeguarded and governed from getting into the wrong hands. The other relevant fact that is most often overlooked is using an open source tool, means developers are constantly making adjustments on the back end. On the back end it is easy to gain access to sensitive information. We call the Microsoft Platform, a “ Walled Garden” because it is has built in firewalls and other security measures. Coupled with additional solutions outlined below we feel this is the first step for a client to be proactive about their data management policies and procedures and compliance.

• Enterprise-grade file sync, enabling secure file access from any device

• Compliant data centers and military-grade security, exceeding industry standards

• Public share links for sharing of large files

• Team share folders for internal collaboration

• Secure share links with granular permissions and enforced credentials for secure, external collaboration

• Real-time collaboration on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations (Collaborative Web Editing)

• Instantly preview files before downloading them with Web Preview

• Lock files from editing

• Outlook plug-in for file sharing within Outlook

• Password enforcement on shares

• Expiration date policies

• Download limit policies

• Notifications on downloads

SECURE ALWAYS-ON NETWORK

• SSAE 16 Type II or SOC Certified

• 99.999% reliability, translating to less than 5 minutes average downtime per year

• Silent Data Corruption Protection, end-to-end checksums to “tag” data with strongly verifiable identifiers

• HTTPS stand-alone processes running behind a firewall

• Persistent and transient encryption key

• Organizational privacy mode

• Data transferred over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encrypted connections

• Server Side Encryption (SSE), using 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (256-bit AES) in transit and at rest

You may need more advanced security capabilities beyond what’s available with Microsoft 0365. This solution provides small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with an additional layer of security. It protects your people while they fully leverage Office 365 business applications.

• Multi-Layered Protection: Essentials provides the same enterprise-class security and visibility used by some of the world’s largest security-minded organizations. Now you can get the same protection for your biggest security risk—your people.

• Advanced Threat Protection: Most attacks target people. They entice them to click on a link in an email or open an attachment. We leverage the advanced power of Targeted Attack Protection, our industry-leading email analysis solution, to protect your people. This unique technology provides you with advanced URL and attachment sandboxing analysis.

• Email Continuity: The Proofpoint Essentials emergency inbox gives Microsoft Office 365 users automatic access to email when Office 365 is down. It keeps business email up and running at all times.

• Secure Email Communications: Securing emails that contain sensitive data is one of your top priorities. No one wants to face fines, bad press and loss of customer trust for losing confidential data or customer information. Proofpoint Essentials email encryption helps you reduce the potential negative impacts of data loss by automatically encrypting email.

Defending Against Targeted Attacks

Microsoft provides basic email security features with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP). It relies on traditional filtering techniques like IP reputation, volume and signature-based anti-virus scans for its email hygiene services. But you need more to protect your people against today’s targeted threats, especially since email is the most reliable way for threats to reach your users. More than 90 percent of targeted attacks start with email. And 99 percent of threats rely on users to run malicious code.

Essentials for Office 365 takes a people-centric approach. It delivers industry-leading email security for SMBs for malware based threats like malicious attachments or links and malware-free threats like email fraud or credential phishing emails.

With our enterprise-class solution, you can protect your users by adding security scrutiny that cannot be matched by traditional approaches.