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# Why Cyber Insurance is Critical for Your Business
July 28, 2020
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Every 40 seconds, a cyber breach occurs globally. When large corporations are targeted, there is endless coverage about consumer impacts, yet small businesses are often more vulnerable because of their smaller budgets and more limited scale. As with many things in life, a preventative approach to online security is immeasurably beneficial, rather than responding to an attack after it happens. One of the best ways to protect your business from the financial costs of a cyber attack or breach is investing in cyber insurance.
 “helps an organization mitigate risk exposure by offsetting costs involved with recovery after a cyber-related security breach or similar event.” Simply put, cyber insurance provides peace of mind, knowing should an attack occur, your business can recover.
### **Who Needs Cyber Insurance?**
Just like auto insurance doesn’t prevent car accidents, cyber insurance does not prevent cyber attacks. Any business that relies on technology for operations, processes sensitive data or stores company and customer information on local or cloud-based servers should consider purchasing cyber insurance. Breaches of these types of data are generally not fully covered under a basic business liability insurance policy, which means companies without cyber insurance are left without recourse to financial assistance to support their recovery.
 of small businesses who suffer a cyber attack, and are unable to recover quickly via data restoration, go out of business within six months. With the combination of near constant attacks and such dire realities of bankruptcy, it’s no wonder the cyber insurance industry is expected to expand to a value of nearly $8 billion by the end of 2020.
### **Types of Insurance**
There a several types of cyber insurance coverage which may be added to your policy, but the most common include:
* **Network Security** – This coverage is important for all businesses and insures you against network breaches. This type generally covers first party costs, rather than those of affected customers.
* **Privacy Liability** – This coverage is especially important for businesses which handle sensitive customer data, like medical information.  It provides recourse for cyber incidents which result in violations of privacy laws.
* **E-Crime** – This coverage is important to recover from fraudulent instruction, funds transfers, or telephone fraud
* **Network Business Interruption** – If your business relies on technology operated by either yourself or a third party partner, this coverage is for you. A network failure due to a hack, human error, or software failures will be covered by network business interruption coverage.
* **Media Liability** – This coverage protects you from violations of your intellectual property.
* **Errors & Omissions (E&O)** – E&O protects you against claims of breach of contract, failure to meet your contractual obligations, and allegations of negligence. This coverage can include the cost of legal fees resulting from these allegations.
### **What Sorts of Attacks Can a Business Face?**
There are many types of cyber attacks like phishing, DoS (denial-of-service), ransomware and other malware attacks. A particularly prevalent type of attack since 2019 involves the attacker gaining access to the email inbox of an account department employee. After having accessed contacts and other information for the business’s clients, the attacker can set up a spoofed domain and send new invoices with new payment routing information. The breached company is now responsible for the dollars lost by their clients as a result of this attack.
Without cyber insurance, the breached company will have to make financial restitution on their own. With a good cyber insurance policy, however, your business will be covered against breaches of this kind. Additionally, cyber insurance can help a company recoup losses suffered from the downtime spent dealing with the aftermath of an attack, and may even be able to recover a ransom should files be unrecoverable following a breach.
### **Non-Financial Consequences of a Cyber Attack**
Most cyber attacks are financially motivated, so it’s easy to only consider the monetary impact of such an event. Yet, another equally devastating impact can be the loss of customer confidence. Consider the customers in the scenario above; will those customers feel safe trusting their data to the breached business again? Can they be confident they will never again make a payment on an invoice for which they are not really responsible? Of course not. The cost in customer trust can be just as serious as the financial ramifications of a cyber attack.
### **What Should My Policy Include?**
Good cyber insurance covers losses as a result of a breach.  Not only direct costs are covered, but a company can recoup losses incurred as a result of downtime to recover from the breach and possibly a ransom if data cannot be restored from backup. Therefore, picking the right policy is crucial for your business.
While each business is unique in some of the additional components they will need to add to their policy, any policy you consider should cover Breach response costs, Legal services, Computer forensic services, Notification services, Call center services, Credit and identity monitoring or other personal fraud or loss prevention solutions.
You’ll also want to ensure it has both first and third party coverage, terms for Public relations and crisis management expenses, and the policy’s multiple limits will be available for breach response.
Cyber insurance is an essential tool in a business’s arsenal of protection against technological problems. Businesses large and small can be targeted by cyber attacks, so companies of all sizes should consider investing in a cyber insurance policy.
We all hope our insurance policies go unused,  but we are certainly grateful for them when disasters strike.
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(214) 691-7800
support@mentis-group.com
Dallas Office
8330 LBJ Freeway, Suite 450
Fort Worth Office
2833 Crockett St.
Houston Office
401 Franklin St., Suite 2400
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##### WHO IS MENTIS GROUP?
Since 2001, we’ve been providing innovative, intelligent, and secure managed IT services to businesses and nonprofit organizations in the Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston areas and beyond. We thrive on forming true partnerships with our clients while delivering customized, business technology and cybersecurity solutions.
# 3 Principles an MSP Must Hold To to Help Your Business Thrive
July 14, 2020
The technology your business utilizes can be a driver of success or it can hold you back. However, technology alone will not equate to a successful business. In today’s technological landscape, businesses need a strategy to keep their tech up to date, and providing and executing that strategy is one of the many ways Mentis Group helps their customers thrive.
### **1. Strategic Planning**
When your technology doesn’t work it isn’t just inconvenient, it can mean lost time and business. These losses aren’t an inevitability. A business that partners with the right MSP should have a plan in place to avoid impactful technology disruptions, and a strategic MSP will help their clients navigate the technology landscape by creating a roadmap for success.
This plan isn’t just about the obvious services like updating technology or recommending replacements. An effective MSP will go beyond reactive scenarios in their planning so their client will be prepared in advance to cross technology roadblocks. You won’t be left scrambling to replace failing technology as it will have already been phased out with careful planning.
Strategic planning with your MSP will put you on the right track so your business can run smoothly without disruption or downtime, in an environment perfectly aligned to your business objectives.
### **2. Future/Growth Minded**
A strategic MSP should help their client identify the technology that aligns best with the client’s business objectives. Technology has an element of risk, and technology not which is not tailored to your specific needs can cause more problems than it solves. Your MSP should also provide you with a timeline for replacing and refreshing your existing technology, which will help you continue innovating into the future.
A strategic MSP isn’t just concerned with your locally installed and hosted hardware or software, either. Those systems will of course be kept up to date, but that’s not the only technology that matters. They will also monitor and refresh your cloud services so that no aspect of the technology your business utilizes ever falls behind, and leverages best of breed solutions and processes.
### **3. Maintain Clients and Employees**
Technology that isn’t up to the latest industry standards  like an inability to hire and keep quality staff, negative customer perception, and even potential legal liabilities. Top quality employees want to be part of a forward thinking and winning team. As such, they expect to have the tools in place to be successful. A business that can’t maintain high caliber staff as a result of outdated technology simply cannot succeed. Without a strategic plan created in partnership with your MSP, your employees’ productivity will suffer and this will result in reductions in both the quantity and quality of their work. Even the most qualified employees won’t succeed in an environment that lacks proper planning and investment in their technology.
These shortcomings will naturally be noticed by a business’s clients. A lack of investment in technology planning can lead not only to an inability to maintain quality employees, but also an inability to retain clients. With stakes this high, a strategic MSP should impress upon their clients the importance of creating a coherent, comprehensive technology plan. A good plan will help your business know what to expect from your technology and exactly where you’re going in the future.
The technology you use can either help or hurt you. With a plan derived from a comprehensive knowledge of your business’s needs and wants, Mentis Group will be sure that your technology is always working for you, not against you.
# 3 Fundamental Considerations for a Hybrid Work Environment
June 30, 2020
As the country begins to open back up, businesses are balancing employee safety with the need to return to full operational capacity. This translates into the creation of work environments that often look quite different from their pre-pandemic state: hybrid in-office and work from home business models. We’ve identified three potential paths to smoothly facilitate the transition.
1. ### **Rotate Employees In and Out of the Office**
A  means having some employees working from home while others return to work together in the office. Creating rotating in and out of office shifts will help maintain an agile workforce, while further ensuring the health and safety of employees. This model has worked well for healthcare workers during the pandemic. Hospitals across the country have broken their workforce into rotating shifts of individuals so that if someone in one group falls ill, the other shift can step in while the first self-quarantines.
While the acute worry of COVID infection will hopefully continue to wane, it is still a good idea to bring workers back to the office in shifts. Not only does this protect everyone’s health, but it also ensures that everyone has the chance to collaborate in person *and* remotely. No one group will feel excluded from the office culture, since everyone will get the opportunity to work both from home and in the office eventually.
2. ### **Socially Distant Work Spaces for Those Who Return to the Office**
Over the last decade, the average personal workspace footprint in an office setting has shrunk dramatically. According to the corporate real estate firm , those numbers have gone from 211.4 sq. ft. per worker in 2009 to 17.6 square feet in 2017. These tight quarters cannot be sustained in an office looking to protect the health of its employees in our current pandemic-minded world. While some of your employees may continue to work from home, how can you implement a plan to protect for those who do return to the office?
There are a number of creative ways your office can manage your physical space to reflect the CDC’s 6 foot distancing recommendation. First the obvious; workspaces should be spaced so that each individual has a full six feet of distance between themselves and their coworkers. This concept, sometimes called the , can be easily reinforced through brightly colored rugs or carpets that remind people where the otherwise invisible boundaries are, thus helping maintain a healthy distance. Colored tape on the floors will even work in a pinch!
You may also consider implementing an occupancy limit for elevators and break rooms, as these smaller spaces can become potential hotspots for virus spreading. Keeping social distance between employees when they are in the office will help maintain a healthy workforce.
3. ### **Implement a Successful Digital Culture**
A robust and well-executed digital technology strategy is the glue that will hold your team together during this time. This isn’t something that happens organically, . Mentis Group works with each of its clients to help them understand, train for, and execute the digital collaboration that is essential to the success of a hybrid work environment.
As part of the onboarding process for each new client, we work with you to help you identify tools you may already be using or help you see where you can add to your portfolio to better facilitate digital collaboration. For example, are you leveraging team collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams or Slack? Tools which facilitate a fully collaborative team whether fully in-office, fully remote, or a combination of the two? Does your team leverage ongoing security awareness training and testing during normal operations, so that when working from home your users already have a sound foundation and process in place to make the correct choices?
Armed with the answers to these types of questions, Mentis can help you manage your digital culture so that all of your employees, whether in-office or not, can contribute meaningfully. Additionally, Mentis’s technicians have been trained to keep client safety front of mind when we visit your office. Not only are our own staff working from home, but we have also armed our team with masks, disinfectant wipes, gloves, and have strict procedures for disinfecting work areas when visiting a client site. Your success is our priority, so we will continue to protect you and your employees not just digitally, but also by preventing the spread of illness.