TSG CEO Rory McKeand on your organisation’s cyber security ‘castle’, utilising the cloud, automation & ‘aping human intelligence’

In my previous blog, I spoke about work culture, what it means to be a leader and mental health.  

In this blog, I’ll focus on the second part of my talk on the Industry Angel Podcast – discussing more about the future of technology.  

Your cyber security castle: threats and defence 

Naturally, a crucial part of any business strategy is assessing your cyber security defences. However, we often come across businesses who don’t actually know their biggest threat – it’s not the unknown, but the known. Your own employees are in fact, the biggest threat. This is due to poor cyber security knowledge; the less they know, the more likely they’ll accidentally click a harmful link, or send over sensitive documents to a fake email address.  

Essentially, they are unknowingly opening the gates to your castle – even if the walls are well defended, a knock at the door can be all it takes to take down the castle from the inside.  

There’s a level of responsibility that needs to be taken from the employer, in order to ensure that both new and existing members of their team are aware of how to mitigate threats to the business.  

That’s why we help ensure that our customers gain as much knowledge working with us as they can; and one of our core cyber security offerings includes training your employees as well as gaining your Cyber Essentials certification.  

Adopting the cloud now, futureproofs companies for later 

If we look at the state of the opinions on the cloud before 2020, there appears to be questions of how secure the cloud was, amongst others.  

It’s true, for those used to on-premise infrastructure, the cloud can be a difficult concept to grasp – the idea of not having a physical storage device, for example, yet knowing your data is somewhere else you can’t actually see, makes it seem like an elusive phenomenon.  

In fact, it’s a relatively simple concept, and one that many businesses are now seeing the advantage of versus an entirely on-premise infrastructure.  

Cloud infrastructure offers a whole range of benefits, including flexibility and scalability. As well as that, your company’s expenditure will move from capital to operational and this is where that flexibility comes in.  

Read more about your choices between on-premise, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures. 

The AI story is years away from being complete: Automation is the real story 

Artificial intelligence is worth keeping an eye on – however, we’re not going to see its true potential with regards to its capabilities in the technology space. Instead, what we’re seeing right now is the early days. For example, chatbots are ‘aping human intelligence’; giving us that human touch but being far away from what it can really do.  

Automation is what we should be discussing; the role that automation can play in your business is invaluable. Automation in technology creates opportunities for growth through simply giving employees back their time in the day by automatically doing work for them. With that being said, we’re talking about the tasks that don’t require that human touch; tasks where technology alone cannot add the same level of output. 

With that being said, automation has a huge role to play right now and the conversations you should be having with your IT supplier should be about how you’re able to get the most out of technologies that are able to do this for you. 

Listen to the podcast here 

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I hope you found these blogs useful. Please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I share my thoughts on the future of business and technology on my personal profile often and always welcome discussion and conversation around topics such as the ones discussed above.