The IT Experts

Have you ever pondered the time lost waiting at traffic lights? While these signals ensure safe navigation in day-to-day life, the red lights can be a source of inconvenience. On average, individuals may spend anywhere from two weeks to half a year waiting at traffic lights throughout their lifetime. Not only does this test one's patience, but it also results in vehicles emitting pollutants into the air during the waiting period.

This 2015 study revealed that intersections, where traffic lights are prominent, exhibit 29 times higher concentrations of particle numbers in the air—nanoparticles produced by burning fuel—compared to other road segments. Approximately 25% of a commuter's exposure to pollutants during their drive is accumulated at stoplights, and nearly half of the emissions at intersections stem from stop-and-go traffic.

To address this issue, Google's Green Light initiative employs AI to collect and analyze data from Google Maps, offering valuable insights to city engineers. This data allows for the optimization of traffic control infrastructure, enabling precise adjustments to various intersections. Remarkably, the initiative requires no additional technology, allowing city engineers to implement changes in as little as five minutes based on the provided recommendations.

Initially introduced in Seattle, Green Light has expanded its reach globally, assisting drivers at 70 busy intersections in cities such as Abu Dhabi, Bali, Bangalore, Budapest, Haifa, Hamburg, Hyderabad, Jakarta, Kolkata, Manchester, and Rio de Janeiro. Preliminary trials indicate a 10 percent decrease in emissions and a 30 percent reduction in the number of stops made.

Beyond traffic control, the success of AI in initiatives like Green Light highlights its potential for problem-solving in various domains. Small and medium-sized businesses, in particular, can benefit from AI's automation capabilities, aiding in data analysis, trend identification, and addressing operational inefficiencies. To explore the possibilities for your business, contact us at (954) 834-2800 today.

There are different perspectives you have that will contribute to your success with RTO and RPO standards. Let’s go over them.

RTO and RPO Identify Specific Points of No Return

To establish some context, your recovery point objective and recovery time objective are used in a worst-case scenario to get your business back in a functional state with minimal data loss and downtime. As you can imagine, there is a fine line that you cannot cross, and RPO and RTO establish this boundary.

Your business will likely place different values on its data according to what is most helpful and most impactful for your operations. It’s up to you to establish these values so you can make effective judgment calls throughout the recovery process.

For example, let’s say you have to go five hours without access to your company email so you can instead focus your efforts on recovering data for other parts of your business. In a circumstance like this, your RTO would be five hours. If you could only lose two hours worth of data at the absolute max, then your RPO would be two hours.

How to Measure Your RTO and RPO

There are a few steps that contribute to this calculation.

It’s important to know just how much downtime actually costs your business. To make this calculator, follow this formula:

First, consider how your business generates revenue. What are the processes involved that contribute to your income? What would it take to keep them running?

The next step is figuring out how much productivity you are losing. Look at the downtime event and determine how many users cannot work properly under its circumstances, what the impact to their productivity is in terms of a percentage, their average hourly salary, and the length of the downtime event. Multiply all of this together. This should give you a rough estimate of what this downtime would cost your business. You can then use this information to calculate your RTO and project an RPO that makes sense.

Of course, there is room for even more information and context as needed. You can include certain systems and assign them a greater value according to how much they are really used, as well as your business’ specific requirements. Ultimately, your business is unique, so its circumstances will also be unique in the event of any disaster scenario.

Let Us Help You Through This Process

KB Technologies Managed IT can help your business determine RPO and RTO. You can then use these details to make more educated decisions about the viability of your business continuity. To learn more, call us at (954) 834-2800 today.

This approach to cybersecurity is appropriately known as zero-trust. Let’s consider what is required to adopt such an approach, using the example of an attempted ransomware attack.

Ransomware is Prevalent Enough to Require Consistent Vigilance

When surveys measure that ransomware infections impacted three-quarters of professional organizations in the last year, it should be clear that ransomware is not something to be taken lightly. It also doesn’t help that protecting yourself from its effects isn’t easy. Not only is it remarkably easy to accidentally let a ransomware infection in, the problems that ransomware brings tend to escalate significantly as time passes.

Some of the issues that ransomware brings to your attention include:

• From the onset of the infection, ransomware eliminates at least a portion of your business’ potential productivity, if not all of it.
• In addition to locking your data out of your reach, many responsible for ransomware will also steal your data before encrypting it, selling it on the Dark Web or putting it to use toward their own nefarious purposes.
• If the ransom isn’t paid within the timeframe, the cybercriminal will leave the data encrypted… but they may do that, even if the ransom is paid.
• Meanwhile, your business’ reputation is floundering as your services aren’t being delivered and your audience is suffering, with their personal information potentially being exposed.
• You’re also likely to receive some unwelcome attention from various regulatory bodies, with fines and other serious penalties involved. 

Naturally, this isn’t something you want your business to have to deal with if it can be helped. Fortunately, a zero-trust approach to security does help.

Zero-Trust Security is the Practical Application of the Principle of Least Privilege

As a security philosophy, rather than a single, specific solution, a zero-trust approach involves every safeguard and protection you have to defend your business and its data. It means you have visibility into who is connecting to your network and accessing what, restricting this access behind role-based rules and privileges and ensuring you are monitoring your systems so you can enforce the standards you’ve implemented.

In the case of ransomware and various other threats to your business, the measures that go into a zero-trust methodology could very well prevent the infection from accessing your system at all.

Trust KB Technologies Managed IT to Help You Implement and Manage a Zero-Trust Policy

We take cybersecurity very seriously, and bake security into everything we do. To ensure that your business is prepared for the future of online threats, give us a call today at (954) 834-2800.