Since 1991, GuardSight partner Advanced Logic Industries has been delivering IT expertise and results to clients throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. From its roots in network integration, Advanced Logic has grown its services and expertise to meet clients’ changing needs for cloud-powered agility and business continuity. Powered by their Brush Mountain Data Centers, Advanced Logic delivers predictable IT performance with cloud-based Data Protection, (BaaS) Communications,(UCaaS) IT Recovery Readiness, (DRaaS) Security (SecOps) and Cloud Computing (IaaS).
Parker Pearson, Chief Strategy Officer for Advanced Logic, weighs in on company solutions, industry trends, and challenges:
What was the driving force behind Advanced Logic’s decision to focus on delivering predictable IT performance through cloud-based solutions?
Our move to the cloud was based on our belief that cloud is more agile, more secure, more stable and made more sense for budgets and balance sheets. But that doesn’t mean it all has to be Amazon and Azure. That’s why we invested in our own Brush Mountain Data Centers back in 2012 that give us greater flexibility and control while interconnecting with over 500 other cloud services around the world.
Describe how Advanced Logic leverages its cloud-based Data Protection, Communications, IT Recovery Readiness, Security, and Cloud Computing solutions to help clients mitigate their cybersecurity risks.
Advanced Logic has built a complete stack of cloud-based solutions to address our clients’ needs for Data Protection, Communications, IT Recovery Readiness, Security, and Cloud Computing. These solutions are organized within a flexible and scalable framework to ensure organizations are not only operating under IT best practices, but meet scrutiny from auditors, insurance underwriters, governance reviews, customers, prospects, and supply chain partners. Our goal is to ensure clients have incredibly reliable and secure systems and are prepared to successfully navigate business continuity challenges.
Figure 1 Advanced Logic’s Full Circle Resiliency Framework
As a Chief Strategy Officer, what are the biggest challenges you see facing clients in the cloud-based cybersecurity space, and how is Advanced Logic addressing those challenges?
I spend a lot of time having executive discussions about business continuity. Cybersecurity is just one component of the framework we use to help organizations assess and review their vulnerabilities and operational resilience. Ransomware has demonstrated such devastating effects to an organization’s financials and reputation that business continuity, failover readiness and response is no longer a Fortune 50 priority, it’s everyone’s priority. Executives understand that they, and their boards of directors, have a fiduciary responsibility for failure to oversee, understand, and validate the IT infrastructure that drives their operations. Are these conversations comfortable? Often no. But they are vital, and by engaging the leadership and integrating them into the conversation, we are often able to help IT to get the backing and support to fix issues that have gone unaddressed due to lack of understanding of the value and impact of their requests.
As a partner of GuardSight, how does Advanced Logic work with GuardSight to deliver comprehensive cybersecurity services to clients, from vulnerability management to incident response?
We understand that almost no IT service provider can be an expert in every single function. We partner with Guardsight to deliver our clients the benefit of a full-time security NOC without incurring the full expense of building and maintaining that highly dynamic area of expertise. Just as legal firms often team up, so too does Advanced Logic to make sure our clients have the services we recommend as part of their overall IT strategy.
How does Advanced Logic support clients in adopting a “security-first” approach to cloud computing, and what best practices do you recommend for IT and cybersecurity professionals in this space?
More often now, we start this conversation at the executive level in the organization. We spend a great deal of time engaging not only with IT, but with executive leadership to ensure that IT is not allowed to be siloed and (often) relatively unsupervised from the overall operational priorities. As part of those conversations, we discuss the executive perspective and expectations, and correlate the reality of their current systems into actionable information that everyone can fully understand. Often, we find that there are significant gaps in alignment, expectations, and execution. Those are the foundational cracks that allow security problems to begin.
If there’s one over-riding recommendation that we’d make to IT professionals, it is to understand their organization’s strategic objectives and engage with leadership proactively to make sure everyone understands each other. Drop the tech-speak, learn to speak the language of your industry and most importantly, of your organization’s leadership. There must be a clear understanding, trust and accountability between the two areas.
How does Advanced Logic ensure that its cloud-based solutions comply with the latest regulatory requirements, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS?
Advanced Logic’s sister company, Donoma Software, has long been providing archiving, data loss prevention and information governance software to regulated industries since 2004. As such, our leadership has been ahead of most Managed IT organizations in understanding the regulatory requirements around data management that have now moved well beyond just GDPR, HIPPA and PCI DSS. We have also undertaken our own SOC-2 certifications that enable us to advise our clients with expertise not only of the data management regulations, but that we hold ourselves to high standards that are independently audited. It’s no longer acceptable for organizations to self-attest on a questionnaire, with the risks in today’s environment, corners cut on proper procedure will not save you when there is an attack or systems compromise.
Finally, could you describe a recent success story that Advanced Logic has achieved for a client in the cloud-based cybersecurity space, and how it has impacted their business?
I would point to a regional bank we work with who early on took a very proactive approach to their entire business continuity posture. Starting with their backup, we moved them from a legacy system into our FLxStore hybrid-cloud Backup-as-a-Service solution. FLxStore backs up their local VMs, as well as protecting their cloud-based Microsoft 365 data and snapshots key employee workstations. (Employee workstation restoration is the often-overlooked area of ransomware recovery that can drive incredible expense and frustration that is completely avoidable.)
The FLxStore service is then connected to our FLxDR service that provides them failover services in the event of a network outage. Often, the time to download and then re-upload data backups is extremely time intensive. Because FLxStore and FLxDR have direct connection, the data can seamlessly connect to standby servers in our cloud and continue operating designated applications until the primary network is ready to resume operations.
To address their cybersecurity posture, we have several security services in place under the umbrella of our FLxSecure services. We incorporate Guardsight as part of our FLxSecure offering to provide clients a highly capable and cost-effective security NOC for far less than it would cost to do it themselves.
Finally, we have added the information governance component with Donoma OneVault. OneVault is a fully encrypted information governance platform that enables organizations to manage, secure and most importantly, securely query communications data and content across their organization.
This bank was able to prioritize these initiatives because it aligns directly to the bank’s need for compliance, pass ongoing third-party audits and satisfy their board of directors’ who maintain regular oversight over operational risk vectors. They are also seeing positive impacts of being able to secure more new business by showing prospective partners and customers how they are innovating, testing, training, and auditing to ensure they are as prepared as possible for any technological threat.
Contact us to learn how we can help your company take a multi-layered approach to cybersecurity and succeed in hybrid or surge-ops mode in the cyber fight against the bad guys!
