Mi-GMIS 2022 Fall Conference

Aunalytics to Showcase Its Portfolio of Managed Services, Enterprise Cloud, and Data Cleansing Solutions for IT Professionals at the 2022 Mi-GMIS Fall Conference in September

Leading Data Management and Analytics Company Provides the Tools Michigan IT Pros Need to Improve Operational Efficiencies and Provide the Highest Levels of IT Security to Their Organizations

South Bend, IN (September 15, 2022) - Aunalytics, a leading data management and analytics company delivering Insights-as-a-Service for mid-market businesses, announced today it will participate in the 2022 Mi-GMIS Fall Conference on September 18-21 in Boyne Falls, Michigan. The event is hosted by the Michigan Government Management Information Sciences and will bring together government IT professionals across the state of Michigan whose role is to meet the informational needs of their organization’s employees and to play an instrumental part in achieving organizational goals using IT resources. The conference program is designed to keep IT professionals abreast of best practices and industry trends, and how they can be applied to their organizations productively and economically.

Aunalytics will feature its managed services, enterprise cloud, and data cleansing portfolio. The company provides IT and security expertise to mid-market businesses in the areas of cities and local government, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and professional services. The company’s Secure Managed Services offering combines mission critical IT services leveraging zero-trust end-to-end security to ensure data is protected regardless of a user’s location. Aunalytics provides managed components that offer stability and security, and its next-generation managed services offering is powered by a data platform that provides data-driven IT answers and embedded security that focuses on people and access.

The full suite of managed IT and integrated security services empowers businesses with a complete, all-encompassing approach that includes 24/7/365 monitoring and management, a synchronized network security platform, workstation and server patching, internet protection, email filtering and security, Office 365 management and security, multi-factor authentication, data and device encryption management, and security awareness training.

The company delivers advanced security for defending against modern threats through a team of engineers and analysts with expert skills and toolsets and, in regulated industries, Aunalytics provides the additional technology and controls required to manage risk. Its team of experts is dedicated to analyzing ever-changing rules and regulations and helping users to create processes and policies for data protection and meet compliance requirements within those industries that are regulated.

Aunalytics’ Enterprise Cloud offering is comprised of infrastructure solutions that provide a highly redundant and scalable platform for hosting servers, data, analytics and applications at any performance level. With the Aunalytics® Cloud Storage and Compute solution, users are assured the highest levels of security, accessibility, expertise, scalability, and savings. Aunalytics’ data centers, located in Northern Indiana and Southwest Michigan, meet the most rigorous standards for security, weather protection, temperature and humidity controls, fire suppression and more.

The company’s cloud offering has achieved Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Ready status and is actively working toward FedRAMP certification. Certified cloud-based products help U.S. federal agencies meet increasingly complex regulations and defend against cybersecurity threats, prevent data loss, enforce compliance, and protect agency domains.

“Government IT professionals across the state of Michigan face similar challenges and opportunities, and are eager for real-world knowledge about emerging technology and management solutions,” said Steven Burdick, Vice President Sales – Cloud, Aunalytics. “Our portfolio of managed services, enterprise cloud, and data cleansing solutions provides the tools they need to improve operational efficiencies and provide the highest levels of IT security. We look forward to meeting with IT pros at the Mi-GMIS Fall Conference and demonstrating how Aunalytics can help them meet the needs of employees and advance their organizations’ goals.”

Tweet this: .@Aunalytics to Showcase Its Portfolio of Managed Services, Enterprise Cloud, and Data Cleansing Solutions for IT Professionals at the 2022 Mi-GMIS Fall Conference in September #Informationtechnology #Managedservices #Enterprisecloud #Datacleansing #Dataplatform #Dataintegration #Dataaccuracy #Digitaltransformation #ITsecurity #Securitytechnology

 

About Aunalytics

Aunalytics is a leading data management and analytics company delivering Insights-as-a-Service for mid-sized businesses and enterprises. Selected for the prestigious Inc. 5000 list for two consecutive years as one of the nation’s fastest growing companies, Aunalytics offers managed IT services and managed analytics services, private cloud services, and a private cloud-native data platform for data management and analytics. The platform is built for universal data access, advanced analytics and AI – unifying distributed data silos into a single source of truth for highly accurate, actionable business information. Its DaybreakTM industry intelligent data mart combined with the power of the Aunalytics data platform provides industry-specific data models with built-in queries and AI for accurate mission-critical insights. To solve the talent gap that so many mid-sized businesses and enterprises located in secondary markets face, Aunalytics’ side-by-side digital transformation model provides the technical talent needed for data management and analytics success in addition to its innovative technologies and tools. To learn more contact us at +1 855-799-DATA or visit Aunalytics at https://www.aunalytics.com or on Twitter and LinkedIn.

 

PR Contact
Denise Nelson
The Ventana Group for Aunalytics
(925) 858-5198
dnelson@theventanagroup.com


4 Questions Mid-market Companies Should Ask Themselves About Data Protection

Article

4 Questions Mid-market Companies Should Ask Themselves About Data Protection

Woman works from home on laptopWhen the working world went remote due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many never returned to the office. This created new data-security challenges for many businesses, with an increasing amount of sensitive data now being stowed in the cloud, and workers continuing to access company data from off-site locations.

How safe is cloud security, which now often relies on “zero trust” security principles based on a user’s location rather than user credentials? While some worry that cloud security is less reliable than on-premise security, that’s not actually the case, particularly for mid-market businesses. The fact is that your data is actually more secure in a remote data center managed by security experts than by your in-house IT team.

You may feel a false sense of security by having your IT department guard your servers in a closet — but this strategy is extremely risky when it comes to data protection. It’s not standard for mid-market IT departments to possess expert skills in cloud security and data security, which are needed to properly safeguard data. Many mid-market companies, particularly those not in highly regulated industries, do not currently have Security Operations Centers.

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Backup vs. Disaster Recovery

Backup vs Disaster Recovery: What’s the Difference?

Your data is vital for your business to function. Often, companies are not completely confident in what should be a part of their Business Continuity Plan (BCP), and do not understand that they need both data backup and disaster recovery to re-operationalize the business to be covered for outages and disasters.

Backup

Data BackupBackup services ensure your data is replicated to a separate, secure location and able to be quickly and easily restored after an outage or disaster event. Many instances of data loss occur due to accidental deletion or corruption, short of an attack or disaster. If you have a backup, what you technically have is a copy of your original data that was last backed up in a virtual or physical location. A backup can be used in case of outage or database failure. It will return data to the last restore point, meaning you may lose some information in the process. Colocation services to store back-ups in multiple separate, secure locations are recommended for resiliency.

Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery services are designed to bring a business back online after a failure at the primary business site. Disaster recovery includes steps to operationalize the data back-ups, and bring back online networks and systems should an attack or outage occur. With a disaster recovery solution in place your organization’s data and the functioning of your IT systems are restored. An all-encompassing Disaster Recovery plan restores business functions and minimizes losses and downtimes. It includes server level and site level restoration. You may have to invest in an entire secondary IT infrastructure unless you have a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) provider.

Disaster RecoveryMost midsized institutions do not have a team of disaster recovery experts in house to help them to get their business up and running in case of an unforeseen disaster. Gartner reports that in a recent survey, 86% of IT leaders state that their recovery capabilities meet or exceed CIO expectations, but only 27% reported having a disaster recovery plan in place that included base elements of recovery: formalizing scope, performing a BIA to understand business requirements, and creating detailed recovery procedures. On the other hand, “those with a solid disaster recovery program are 40% more likely to demonstrate a stronger overall resilience posture.” Disaster recovery experts supplement your IT team to restore systems and business operations.

Business Continuity Plan

A Business Continuity Plan should include both backup procedures so that you protect your business from data loss, and disaster recovery plans to restore networks, systems and data after failure at your primary business site. For IT resiliency, your plan should include: active monitoring and assessment of IT hazards; resiliency risk assessment including potential consequences; risk and mitigation strategies; understanding of business relevance of the assets to understand business drivers and classify assets in terms of business criticality; and setting IT resilience priorities. Recovery plans should be drilled and tested regularly.

Aunalytics Backup and Disaster Recovery services will give your organization the peace of mind that, no matter what circumstances come, a trusted partner will have your back. You will not have to worry about data loss or theft, as backing up your on-premises data to the cloud will allow your company to have a business continuity plan in place to save critical business information, and you will have experts on hand to help your IT team restore networks, systems and data after a disaster.


Aunalytics and 1st Source Bank logos

1st Source Bank Focuses on Serving Customers with the Selection of Aunalytics Secure IT Managed Services

Company Gains Full Suite of IT Services as Infrastructure Shifts to the Cloud

South Bend, IN (August 2, 2022) - Aunalytics, a leading data platform company delivering Insights-as-a-Service for mid-market businesses, today announced that South Bend, Indiana-based 1st Source Bank, is adopting Aunalytics Secure Managed IT Services so that it can quickly leverage cloud technology and also upgrade baseline infrastructure. Under the new arrangement, Aunalytics’ services will include data center infrastructure, server infrastructure, endpoint management, backup and disaster recovery (DR), and cybersecurity.

Established in 1863, 1st Source Bank assists its clients with building wealth and achieving financial security. The bank is a community financial services provider with community values and has held these same principles while providing outstanding customer service for more than 150 years. 1st Source operates across 81 branches in Indiana and Michigan and oversees a Specialty Finance Group that provides financing for aircraft, trucks, and construction equipment.

Prior to selecting Aunalytics, the organization conducted a thorough evaluation of its technology operations and decided to avoid locking the company into a hardware environment for another five-year period. The IT leadership chose to focus its IT resources on applications, data, and integration priorities of the business instead of continuing to support hardware internally. Additionally, the IT team at 1st Source Bank sought to deploy a near-term cloud option and expand upon its backup and DR options in order to build a more flexible and fully redundant computing environment.

Another draw on the bank’s IT staff was server management, which Aunalytics will also oversee. And with future plans to implement more advanced operational analytics, 1st Source Bank plans to start a full data management initiative, taking its data strategy to the next level.

“When it comes to IT infrastructure, there are several things that we need to maintain control over: The customer experience, data efficiency and innovation,” said Inder Koul, Chief Information Officer, 1st Source Bank. “Customers are intimately linked with their data so it must be closely guarded, and innovation will allow us to test new and compelling services that will provide a range of new and thoroughly secure services. With Aunalytics, there will be a 360-degree view of managed activities and greater context to deepen our relationships with customers.”

The Aunalytics Managed Services team provides ongoing support and security for 1st Source Bank servers, workstations, and networking equipment. The company provides 24/7/365 remote monitoring and management to mitigate the risk of valuable infrastructure becoming unavailable. Hardware and software are fully managed to proactively address any issues. The company's remote monitoring agent includes client-based interactive support, performance management, alerting, asset management and reporting, as well as on-site advisors to help mitigate any possible risks to the environment.

“Successful banks are flipping the script when it comes to IT management, bringing in managed IT and solution experts like Aunalytics to oversee an important range of tasks,” said Rich Carlton, President, Aunalytics. “By enhancing its IT processes with Aunalytics, 1st Source Bank will able to more efficiently and effectively service its clients. As a result, the bank’s customers will benefit from more sophisticated products and services in 2022 and beyond.”

 

Tweet this: 1st Source Bank Focuses on Infrastructure Modernization and Cloud Adoption with the Selection of @Aunalytics Secure IT Managed Services - https://www.aunalytics.com/category/pr/  #datacenter #datacenterinfrastructure #serverinfrastructure #endpointmanagement #backupanddisasterrecovery #DR #cybersecurity #Dataplatform #Dataintegration #Dataaccuracy  #DigitalTransformation

 

About Aunalytics

Aunalytics is a data platform company delivering answers for your business. Named a Digital Innovator by analyst firm Intellyx, and selected for the prestigious Inc. 5000 list, Aunalytics provides Insights-as-a-Service to answer enterprise and mid-sized companies’ most important IT and business questions. The Aunalytics® cloud-native data platform is built for universal data access, advanced analytics and AI while unifying disparate data silos into a single golden record of accurate, actionable business information. Its DaybreakTM industry intelligent data mart combined with the power of the Aunalytics data platform provides industry-specific data models with built-in queries and AI to ensure access to timely, accurate data and answers to critical business and IT questions. Through its side-by-side digital transformation model,  Aunalytics provides on-demand scalable access to technology, data science, and AI experts to seamlessly transform members’ businesses. To learn more contact us at +1 855-799-DATA or visit Aunalytics at https://www.aunalytics.com or on Twitter and LinkedIn.

 

PR Contact:
Denise Nelson
The Ventana Group for Aunalytics
(925) 858-5198
dnelson@theventanagroup.com


Cloud providers are key to mid-market success

The Key to Data-Driven Success for Mid-Market Companies Starts Here

Article

The Key to Data-Driven Success for Mid-Market Companies Starts Here

Partnering with an experienced cloud provider is a great strategy for mid-market companies to employ for their data center management needsWhat’s the #1 pain point for IT professionals? According to the business knowledge resource Insights for Professionals, it’s data center management. With this reality in mind, the foundation of digital transformation success for a data-driven business must begin at the data center level, where servers store your data, CPUs power your computations, and your systems are ideally kept stable, operational, and secure for all users, including those accessing company systems and data from multiple remote locations. Competitive mid-market companies rely on data center engineers who specialize in uptime by proactively preventing downtime, as well as connectivity, storage, security, and monitoring.

 

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Managed IT Services Drive Value for Mid-Sized Businesses

Managed IT Services Drive Value for Mid-Sized BusinessesIn today’s world, technology is essential to business. While many organizations simply see IT as a cost center, there are ways to mitigate these costs by utilizing managed IT services to increase reliability, reduce risk, and increase operational efficiency. Organizations must invest in IT to continue to stay relevant and secure in a changing world—employees working from home during and after the pandemic is a prime example. But this kind of flexibility requires continued innovation within the IT space, and mid-sized businesses oftentimes lack the resources to do so on their own. Managed IT solutions are the key to mitigating risk while continually improving business processes—providing real business value to the company.

 

Increased Reliability

Modern businesses run on technology, making the IT department indispensable to daily operations. Unfortunately, outages can and do happen, and when they do, they can be very costly. Gartner estimates that on average, downtime costs companies $5,600 per minute or somewhere between $140K to $540K per hour. Even after an outage is resolved, it requires effort to restore lost data, make required updates, install necessary hardware upgrades, and ultimately get business back on track.

This worst-case scenario can be avoided by working with a managed IT services provider who works around the clock to manage hardware and software and will proactively address issues before they lead to costly outages and downtime.

Aunalytics offers a Secure Managed Services solution that includes 24/7/365 remote monitoring and management to mitigate the risk of your valuable infrastructure going down or becoming unavailable. Our advanced monitoring tool ecosystem allows us to not only respond to equipment that is reporting down in a timely manner, but also to proactively detect system issues and repair them ahead of downtime. Our remote monitoring agent includes client-based interactive support, performance management, alerting, asset management and reporting, while on-site support ensures issues can be resolved quickly at any time of day.

 

Reduced Security Risk

Ensuring that systems are up-to-date and constantly monitored is just one piece of the equation. Cyberattacks are an increasingly ubiquitous threat for businesses both large and small. In 2021, ransomware attacks increased by almost 105% worldwide, Fortune reports. And these increases are even higher in certain industries—in 2021, governments worldwide saw a 1,885% increase in ransomware attacks, while the health care industry faced a 755% increase, according to the 2022 Cyber Threat Report. In addition, attacks are becoming increasingly malicious and complex. Statista reports that the average duration of the downtime after a ransomware attack had increased from 15 to 20 days between Q1 2020 and Q4 2021.

Cloud, Security, Managed IT services

Just as outages and disruptions due to technical issues can be avoided with proactive maintenance measures, there are steps organizations can take to avoid cyberattacks. McKinsey cites several tactics that have proven successful at mitigating cyberattacks which include: securing remote workstations, multifactor authentication, patch management, disabling user-level command-line capabilities and blocking TCP port 445, protecting Active Directory, and organization-wide education and training.

The in-house IT department of a mid-sized business could implement many of these tactics on its own, but generally these individuals are not data security experts. Knowing how to effectively monitor, manage, detect, prevent, and respond to cyberattacks is a very specialized skillset. Big enterprises have the bandwidth to take on these divisions. The mid-market does not.

By partnering with a managed IT services provider who is entrenched in the latest security best practices and strategies, mid-market companies avoid making costly mistakes and omissions. They can stay well-protected at all times. At Aunalytics, our security expertise includes proactive security services that your business needs to thrive. As threats evolve, your security solutions must adapt. We meet you where you are and guide you on a journey to mature your overall security posture and manage risk.

 

Increased Operational Efficiency

One of the biggest benefits to partnering with a managed IT services provider is increased operational efficiency. The IT team of a mid-sized business spends most of its time dealing with day-to-day challenges, and they don’t have time to think too far ahead. It can also be difficult for businesses to hire and retain IT talent. Mid-sized businesses increase operational efficiency when they utilize the talents of a managed IT services partner to advise, build, and maintain solutions on the forefront of technological advances. This partnership gives the organization’s internal team the freedom to focus on what they do best.

At Aunalytics, we strongly believe that innovation through technology makes teams more efficient. We are committed to helping organizations digitally transform by guiding and assisting them along every step of the journey. ultimately, allowing them to thrive by working side-by-side with existing teams to drive positive business outcomes through the use of Aunalytics’ technology and solutions.

 

Aunalytics Managed IT Services

To achieve our mission of helping mid-market businesses thrive, Aunalytics offers a wide range of managed IT and security services. It Aunalytics, we believe security is so vital that our Secure Managed Services solution includes embedded security. We offer everything needed to support the IT needs of mid-sized businesses, including:

  • 24/7/365 Remote Monitoring & Management
  • Synchronized Network Security Platform
  • Internet Protection
  • Workstation & Server Patching
  • Office 365 Management & Security
  • Email Filtering & Security
  • Multi-Factor Authentication
  • Data & Device Encryption Management
  • Security Awareness Training

Managed IT Cycle - Advise > Build > Maintain > Business Outcomes

But at the core of all of our offerings is the team of experts that work side-by-side with clients to meet both their everyday needs and make improvements that will benefit them long-term. For urgent day-to-day issues, the Aunalytics Service Desk is available 24/7/365. Our Service Desk is comprised of knowledgeable technicians and engineers working in tandem to tackle technical issues—both simple and complex—that impact our clients. To keep your business moving forward for the future, we work with your team make improvements to your existing tech stack. With years of experience working with the mid-market, we are confident recommending new technologies and procedures your team may not even realize you need.

The technology and security experts at Aunalytics reduce your risk and increase your efficiency. Gain peace of mind by knowing that our team is there to support your tech initiatives and keep your business up and running and secure.


Cloud providers are key to mid-market success

The Key to Data-Driven Success for Mid-market Companies Starts Here

Article

The Key to Data-Driven Success for Mid-Market Companies Starts Here

Partnering with an experienced cloud provider is a great strategy for mid-market companies to employ for their data center management needsWhat’s the #1 pain point for IT professionals? According to the business knowledge resource Insights for Professionals, it’s data center management. With this reality in mind, the foundation of digital transformation success for a data-driven business must begin at the data center level, where servers store your data, CPUs power your computations, and your systems are ideally kept stable, operational, and secure for all users, including those accessing company systems and data from multiple remote locations. Competitive mid-market companies rely on data center engineers who specialize in uptime by proactively preventing downtime, as well as connectivity, storage, security, and monitoring.

Effectively managing data to support accessibility and security requires consistent monitoring and up-to-date solutions. Yet the latest research shows that investing in on-premise infrastructure for data management, compliance, and analytics is too pricey for most mid-market companies — and from the view of many IT directors, on-premise solutions have already morphed into old relics. In 2022, Insights for Professionals reported that nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of senior IT leaders and company executives aren’t planning to attempt to maintain servers on-premise. Instead, the majority of leaders surveyed plan to invest in cloud infrastructure as a service.

 

Moving into the Future

Cloud providers provide value to the mid-marketIn short, entire businesses are migrating to the cloud, not just the technology. The infinite growth of data, applications, connections, and workloads will only further exacerbate businesses’ ability to adapt to new lines of business applications and platforms, meet security and governance requirements, and seamlessly orchestrate and analyze data for business outcomes. As a result, a growing number of mid-market companies are recognizing the value of working with partners to transition storage, computing, backup, and hosting services to cloud-based platforms to leverage the scale and compute power they can provide.

Gartner reports that by 2025, the vast majority — 85 percent — of enterprises will have already shifted over to a cloud-first approach. How did this changing of the guard occur so quickly? According to Gartner, it can be traced in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has accelerated cloud adoption since 2020, ushering it in as the “de facto new normal.” Gartner analysts including Gregor Petri even go so far as to state that “enterprise architecture and technology leaders should reject any new product that does not follow ‘cloud first’ as a guiding principle.”

 

Mid-Market Essentials

Aunalytics Enterprise Cloud

There are solid reasons behind mid-market businesses moving their data out of on-premise environments, particularly due to the efficiencies obtained from cloud-based business applications in multi-cloud and hybrid environments. This brings us back to data center vendors, who must then be ready to absorb the responsibility and cost of infrastructure capital expenses and maintenance — and it looks like many are already prepared to do so. In 2022 alone, nearly one-third (32 percent) of those surveyed by Insights for Professionals were planning to invest heavily in cloud management, to the tune of $500,000, while nearly 30 percent plan to spend even more. The largest part of this cloud management investment is being channeled toward security, with enterprises intending to spend 82 percent of this budget on data protection.

This is not a passing trend and is expected to have long-term consequences for purchase decisions in mid-market companies. By 2023, as scalability and cohesive cloud ecosystems join the ranks among the top three buying considerations for IT, Gartner anticipates that cloud architects will become key stakeholders when choosing tools for analytics and business intelligence. Here’s another surprising statistic to show the direction we’re heading in: while hyper-scale cloud providers (hyper-scalers) delivered and managed less than 1 percent of installed edge computing platforms in 2020, Gartner predicts this number to balloon to 20 percent by the end of 2023.

 

Different Needs for Mid-Market Players

There’s a catch, though, about hyper-scalers: most are not built for the mid-market. Therefore, mid-market companies won’t be able to reap the maximum benefit from the ability of traditional hyper-scale cloud providers to bring global business solutions, outsourcing, and consulting capabilities that can help other types of organizations migrate to, adopt, and build cloud-native offerings. It’s true that traditional hyper-scalers excel in leveraging the expertise of their cloud professionals to consult for platform re-architecture, application development, data migration, and transitioning services from technology stacks into macro- and microservices hosted in a data center on-premise, private cloud, public cloud (or any multi-cloud or hybrid combination thereof) — but not generally for mid-market companies.

Let’s drill down into some specific problems for mid-market players around hyper-scale cloud providers:

  • It can be cost-prohibitive to obtain the level of help that most mid-market companies require, since most hyper-scalers are priced for large enterprises. Mid-market companies tend to need “white glove” services, which carry the highest price tag.
  • Greater needs. Enterprises are more likely to already have in-house teams with the necessary skillsets to work with traditional hyper-scalers, compared to mid-market businesses that often have higher needs for expert help.
  • No data analytics. While many enterprise hyper-scalers help migrate data to third-party cloud vendor platforms, their services end there, as they don’t offer data analytics.

Mid-market companies need technical experts to help build solutions on a mid-market budget — specifically, they require a hyper-scaler capable of providing an end-to-end solution focused on the mid-market sector. The goal in evaluating potential solutions providers should be for the cloud foundation to operate seamlessly with end-to-end data management and analytics solutions. With an end-to-end solution, mid-market businesses have the opportunity to obtain the results they desire without wasting time on a “Frankenstein” approach, assembling parts and pieces of multiple technologies and tools in an attempt to construct a reliable system that actually works. It’s only by going the end-to-end route that mid-market companies can receive the greater level of assistance they need on the technology front, as well as benefit from the robust data and analytics skillsets necessary to achieve meaningful business outcomes, without paying enterprise prices.


Why Mid-Market Organizations Need Digital Transformation Solutions that Combine the Right Technology and Talent to Achieve Business Value

Why Mid-Market Organizations Need Digital Transformation Solutions that Combine the Right Technology and Talent to Achieve Business Value

At Aunalytics, we know that an organization’s everyday data holds value, yet is a resource that often remains untapped. This is especially true for the mid-market—this market segment has been underserved and often lacks access to data management and analytics technologies and expertise. Our mission is to empower the mid-market with solutions that enable digital transformation so they can compete and stay relevant.

Digital transformation calls for mid-market companies to shift away from operational silos and work across the company to harness the power of data. This requires the integration of diverse technology across all functional business areas to enable convergence, promote a positive cultural change, drive customer value, and facilitate operational agility. Gartner’s report “Over 100 Data and Analytics Predictions Through 2025” asserts that by 2024, 75% of organizations will have established a centralized data and analytics center of excellence to support federated data and analytics initiatives and prevent enterprise failure. By 2023, organizations with shared companywide data management goals, including stewardship, governance, and semantics to enable inter-enterprise data sharing, will outperform those that don’t.

There is a recipe for successfully transforming massive amounts of corporate and third-party data created and used daily in your lines of business into a valuable asset. But to achieve business outcomes, organizations need to implement digital transformation solutions that include the right technologies/tools combined with the right talent.

 

Aunalytics End-to-end platform

The Right Tools and Technology

Mid-market companies generally do not currently have the tools needed to find value in their data through advanced analytics and AI. An enterprise data warehouse is only one piece of the puzzle. Successful mid-market digital transformation requires the appropriate storage and compute infrastructure, data management platform, and analytics software. It can be difficult to piece together each of these components into a single, unified system—it is expensive, time-consuming, and inefficient.

To solve this challenge, Aunalytics has developed a robust, cloud-native data platform built for universal data access, powerful analytics, and AI. Mid-market businesses benefit from using an end-to-end, cloud-based platform as it moves the burden of infrastructure procurement and maintenance to a third-party vendor in the data industry. An end-to-end platform is secure, reliable, and scalable while including the added benefit of being deployed and managed as a service. This is especially important for mid-market businesses because finding the right talent to execute digital transformation initiatives is extremely challenging in the current market.

 

The Right Talent and Expertise

Most IT departments do not currently have the skill sets needed for getting business value out of data. At the same time, for most mid-market companies, it does not make business sense to hire an entire division of highly compensated data experts to achieve digital transformation goals. Even if a mid-market company can find and hire these scarce resources—they were hard to come by even before the Talent War of 2022.

Experts by your sideEstablishing a side-by-side partnership with a data platform company is the key to gaining the benefits of working with experts including cloud engineers, data engineers, security experts, data scientists and other highly skilled technical resources to achieve true business value. By getting expert help, you can devote your company’s time, resources, and innovation to your business and focus on what you do best.

Aunalytics provides a team of experts who assist every step of the way. Mid-market businesses will have access to the right tools, resources, and support throughout our end-to-end process. Our team also includes industry experts who help businesses identify areas in which data can provide the most value, and guidance on how to work toward achieving these goals.

 

Aunalytics’ Digital Transformation Solution Gives Mid-Sized Businesses Answers

 

Tools + Talent = Business Outcomes

 

With Aunalytics, you get the technology and expertise required to complete the journey from data to actionable business results. This combination accelerates digital transformation, which allows businesses to realize the value of their investment quickly. By taking advantage of the experienced data professionals at Aunalytics, organizations can save time and avoid making costly mistakes while also maximizing the value currently hidden in their data.


2022 Grand Rapids IT Symposium

Aunalytics to Feature Portfolio of Managed Services, Enterprise Cloud, and Data Cleansing Solutions for IT Executives at the Grand Rapids IT Symposium

South Bend, IN (May 25, 2022) - Aunalytics, a leading data platform company delivering Insights-as-a-Service for mid-market businesses, will feature its managed services, enterprise cloud, and data cleansing portfolio at the Grand Rapids IT Symposium on May 26, 2022. The one-day event, designed exclusively for the IT executive community, will be held at DeVos Place in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Aunalytics provides IT and security expertise to mid-market businesses in the areas of financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and professional services. The company’s Secure Managed Services offering combines mission critical IT services leveraging zero-trust end-to-end security to ensure data is protected regardless of a user’s location. Aunalytics provides managed components that offer stability and security, and its next-generation managed services offering is powered by a data platform that provides data-driven IT answers and embedded security that focuses on people and access.

The full suite of managed IT and integrated security services empowers businesses with a complete, all-encompassing approach that includes 24/7/365 monitoring and management, a synchronized network security platform, workstation and server patching, internet protection, email filtering and security, Office 365 management and security, multi-factor authentication, data and device encryption management, and security awareness training.

The company delivers advanced security for defending against modern threats through a team of engineers and analysts with expert skills and toolsets and, in regulated industries, Aunalytics provides the additional technology and controls required to manage risk. Its team of experts is dedicated to analyzing ever-changing rules and regulations and helping users to create processes and policies for data protection and meet compliance requirements within those industries that are regulated.

Aunalytics’ Enterprise Cloud offering is comprised of infrastructure solutions that provide a highly redundant and scalable platform for hosting servers, data, analytics and applications at any performance level. With the Aunalytics® Cloud Storage and Compute solution, users are assured the highest levels of security, accessibility, expertise, scalability, and savings. Aunalytics’ data centers, located in Northern Indiana and Southwest Michigan, meet the most rigorous standards for security, weather protection, temperature and humidity controls, fire suppression and more.

As data continues to expand exponentially, the challenge of data cleansing is rapidly becoming more difficult, as well as expensive. Aunalytics’ Aunsight™ Golden Record turns siloed data from disparate systems into a single source of truth across the organization. Powered with data accuracy, the cloud-native platform cleanses data to reduce errors, and Golden Record as a Service matches and merges data together into a single source of accurate business information, giving users access to consistent, trusted data across the organization in real-time. With this self-service offering, users can unify all their data to ensure enterprise-wide consistency and better decision making.

“As digital transformation continues to be a high priority for many organizations, IT executives are eager for real-world knowledge about business changing technology and management solutions that are absolutely critical to drive their businesses forward,” said Rich Carlton, President and CRO of Aunalytics. “Our portfolio of managed services, enterprise cloud, and data cleansing solutions provides the tools they need to accelerate their digital transformation journeys. We look forward to meeting with members of the IT community at the Grand Rapids IT Symposium, and demonstrating how Aunalytics can help them advance their business success.”

 

Tweet this: .@Aunalytics Aunalytics to Feature Portfolio of Managed Services, Enterprise Cloud,

and Data Cleansing Solutions for IT Executives at the Grand Rapids IT Symposium #GRSYM #Informationtechnology #Managedservices #Enterprisecloud #Datacleansing #Dataplatform #Dataintegration #Dataaccuracy #Digitaltransformation #ITsecurity #Securitytechnology

 

About Aunalytics

Aunalytics is a data platform company delivering answers for your business. Selected for the prestigious Inc. 5000 list, Aunalytics provides Insights-as-a-Service to answer enterprise and mid-sized companies’ most important IT and business questions. The Aunalytics® cloud-native data platform is built for universal data access, advanced analytics and AI while unifying disparate data silos into a single golden record of accurate, actionable business information. Its DaybreakTM industry intelligent data mart combined with the power of the Aunalytics data platform provides industry-specific data models with built-in queries and AI to ensure access to timely, accurate data and answers to critical business and IT questions. Through its side-by-side digital transformation model, Aunalytics provides on-demand scalable access to technology, data science, and AI experts to seamlessly transform customers’ businesses. To learn more contact us at +1 855-799-DATA or visit Aunalytics at https://www.aunalytics.com  or on Twitter and LinkedIn.

 

PR Contact:
Denise Nelson
The Ventana Group for Aunalytics
(925) 858-5198
dnelson@theventanagroup.com


Ransomware Attacks Now Target Community Businesses

Ransomware Attacks Now Target Community Businesses

If you think that your business will not be a target for ransomware attackers, think again. This is no longer a problem only for large enterprises—now, ransomware attacks target community businesses as well.

The Battle Creek, Michigan community woke up to a May Day attack that forced its Kellogg Community College (KCC) to close all operations. In the middle of preparations for final exams, all five campuses serving approximately 6900 students closed and all operations came to a screaming halt.

The community college posted alerts on its website and social media:

 

UPDATE FOR KCC STUDENTS AND STAFF: As we have previously informed you, we have been victim of a ransomware attack on our systems and services. We are still working to understand the full extent of this incident, but since our last update, we have been working diligently with our IRT team and have made progress into our restoration process. To our students: all campuses will remain closed tomorrow and until further notice to all our students. All classes are also canceled until we are able to reopen safely.

 

Eric Greene, the Vice President for Strategy, Relations, and Communications at KCC said: “We are still working to understand the full extent of this incident, but as soon as we became aware of it, we immediately assembled a multi-disciplinary team and engaged independent legal counsel and external forensic experts.”

Greene continued, “KCC had backups in place, and we are working systematically with our IT experts to restore our operations.” But even though KCC had backups, “As a precautionary measure, all campuses have been disconnected and our systems will remain offline until they are deemed secure by our IT experts. As a result, our students and staff might experience delays accessing our services, including campus emails, online classes, and resources,” Greene said.

Back-ups alone are not sufficient to prevent business disruption when a ransomware attack hits. Preventing the attack, rather than having to respond to it, is key. KCC remained closed for three days while IT scrambled. All computer access to university systems had to be shut down in an attempt to stop further damage. The response and mitigation included a forced password reset for all students, faculty and staff, and adding multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all users.

Enable Multi-factor Authentication

MFA is an important security measure when people access systems remotely. It provides an extra level of verification to make sure that the user attempting to access the system is really an authorized user and not a bad actor trying to get in. Modern business regularly includes employees logging in from home, travel and mobile devices to access data and systems from their organization. As such, the old firewall security perimeter around your place of business does not protect you. Modern security requires focus on users and access. MFA is something that is easy to add to your security stack. The protection benefit from MFA far outweighs the resource cost of installing and using the technology. Really, there is no excuse for not having MFA in today’s threat landscape. It is standard.

So if you do nothing else this year to improve your security posture, add MFA. But considering that community businesses are becoming targets for cybercrimes, unless you can afford a complete shut-down of your business, it is becoming a must to have modern security technologies (including robust monitoring so that you are equipped to prevent attacks and are better positioned to respond and mitigate), in addition to back-up and disaster recovery plans.

Shift Applications to the Cloud

Mid-market businesses are shifting security and data center responsibilities from on premise servers and security maintained by their IT department, to partnering with cloud experts who run data centers, keeping client systems stable and secure as their full time business. The trend with line of business applications used by your team for daily operations is cloud. As more and more community businesses use cloud based apps for functions like accounting, customer portals, ERP, CRM and HR, having cloud experts with the tools and the skills to be able to secure your organization’s data (from multiple sources) for safe use by remote users makes more sense than trying to build a security fortress yourself at your place of business.

Partner with Experts

If cybersecurity is not your main line of business, partner with security experts unless you want cybersecurity to become your main line of business. It will consume your resources to stay current with emerging threats, protective means, 24/7/365 monitoring, best practices and constantly evolving security measures. The ever increasing sophistication and volume of attacks has shifted the answer to the “buy it or build it” question for this critical business service from the solution being your in-house IT department to the solution requiring managed security services to supplement your in-house IT team.

Don’t become the next ransomware attack headline. Community businesses can take steps to avoid ransomware attacks. An ounce of prevention, after all, is less costly than the cost of operational shut-down, PR scramble, customer service disruption, brand reputation tarnishment, and emergency security consultant fees paid when you are in the middle of an attack that succeeded.