Informative speakers, a hands-on disaster demo, lunch, networking, and prizes…. what a day!
Last week, iuvo Technologies hosted our first public event: the IT Symposium of Awesomeness. The Symposium enabled business professionals to gather for an intensive and fun, informative and engaging, stimulating and rewarding, and overall awesome morning. We covered the critical IT topics you need to ensure your business thrives.
After an introduction from Bryon Beilman, Chris Russo kicked off the presentations with his take on the Human Firewall. This idea stems from the fact that the best IT security architecture is security in layers. While firewalls, antivirus and patching are critical to keeping your network and data safe, humans are often the weakest link. Chris dissected some high-profile data breaches and provided a very practical methodology that will allowed attendees to turn their employees into a firewall.
Scott Taylor followed with a discussion on some cutting-edge internet security mitigation techniques used by Oracle + Dyn to ensure that core Internet functions remain secure and highly available. This presentation was extremely timely considering today's cyber criminals can use many methods to attack and attempt to disable websites and Internet connected businesses. Also, new attacks and methods are continuously popping up like Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks, BGP Hijacks and various types of DNS Attacks This presentation combined with the Human Firewall made for some awesome security training.
Even when your security is top notch, you can't prevent everything. Natural disasters and human error can cause crippling downtime and leave businesses struggling to get back up and running. That's why we demonstrated, in a grandiose fashion, the capabilities of intelligent backup and business continuity. After a quick rundown of the current security landscape, and an attempt to not "horror story" our attendees to death, we smashed through our Datto Disaster Demo... with a sledgehammer. After cleaning up some of the debris we went to our local Datto device, then to the Datto cloud, and the Symposium powered on.
Wrapping up the presentations, Steve King from allConnex guided us through the important decisions to consider before moving to a cloud-based phone system. There are so many cloud based and IP phone systems in the market that can cost effectively provide better features and service than the traditional phone system, but it's difficult to decide which one is right for your business. Steve discussed price, features, flexibility, quality, stability and many other factors along with keeping the business continuity theme going.
After the presentations, attendees got to eat lunch, network, and we raffled off some amazing prizes (including some tickets to this crazy Red Sox game).
The IT Symposium of Awesomeness was just that, pure awesomeness. We're glad our "tongue-in-cheek moniker" of a name stuck because it was so fitting. We effectively packed all the critical topics related to cybersecurity and cloud computing that we see in the field into one morning. Our aim was to enable attendees to walk away with actionable knowledge that will help empower their business, and we look to replicate the awesomeness in our future events.