Every year Cisco releases an annual Cybersecurity Report detailing the state of global cybersecurity. In the most recent edition, two key trends stood out to me as threats that every business owner and IT manager should be aware of and prepared for.

Managed services providers (MSPs) offer 24/7 support for your entire IT infrastructure: software, hardware, and configurations. These services are remotely monitored and managed in order to keep a pulse on your IT environment at all times.

As technology relentlessly pushes forward, you and your organization will undoubtedly need to upgrade your hardware. However, you can’t simply forget about your old hardware while reaping the benefits of replacing it with the latest and greatest. You should be excited about the upgrade, but how will you transfer data from your old equipment to the new? How will you erase data from the original hardware?

By now, you’ve probably heard about the Starwood Hotel breach. In November, Marriott, the world’s largest hotel chain, confirmed that as many as 500 million people who made reservations at one of its Starwood properties could have had their personal information—including names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, passport and credit card info—stolen by Chinese hackers. Peter Aiken, associate professor of information systems at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Business, calls the attack “the biggest threat to U.S. national security that we have ever faced” from a data breach.

At the recent TEDxHartford event, Kelser Vice President of Professional Services Matt Kozloski spoke about cybersecurity. His goal -- and our goal as a Cybersecurity-as-a-Service provider -- is to change the way the we think about cybersecurity, so that it becomes part of our habits. Watch the video and enjoy some choice quotes below.

Each organization has its own approach to cybersecurity—some of them better than others. While many small businesses take a proactive role by working with third-party managed security service providers, others are content to employ “security through obscurity,” hoping that there will always be a bigger, more appealing target. Unfortunately, every business is a potential target for cyber criminals.

With news of another cyber attack in the headlines every other week, it’s hardly surprising that businesses of all sizes and industries are growing more and more concerned. 68 percent of organizations believe that they are “very vulnerable” or “extremely vulnerable” to a data breach.

It can be scary out there in the digital world. It seems like not a week goes by where we don’t hear about phishing emails, unpatched vulnerabilities, or the latest strain of ransomware exposing the data of millions of people and businesses to the prying eyes of malicious actors. Every person and every business are potential targets with some of the largest companies in the world susceptible to the same vulnerabilities as the average Joe at their home computer (phishing being a prime example). But all is not lost as October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month! What better time to review your cybersecurity practices, discover where you can make improvements, and seize the chance to make positive change? Consider it a fall “spring cleaning” for your digital life and business.