IT Infrastructure
Reviewed by Sarah Mitchell, CISA RTO (Recovery Time Objective) defines how long you can be down; RPO (Recovery Point Objective) defines how much data you can afford to lose. These two numbers determine your disaster recovery architecture and budget. The IBM 2023 Cost of a Data Breach report found that
IT Infrastructure
Reviewed by the Fully Compliance editorial team Short answer: The 3-2-1 backup rule requires three copies of your data, on two different media types, with one copy stored off-site. This protects against single backup failures, technology-specific failures, and site-level disasters. Modern ransomware threats have extended the rule to 3-2-1-Immutable, adding
IT Infrastructure
Reviewed by the Fully Compliance editorial team Short answer: The shared responsibility model divides cloud security between provider and customer. The provider secures physical infrastructure, hypervisors, and the network backbone. You secure everything from the operating system upward in IaaS, from the application layer upward in PaaS, and user access
IT Infrastructure
Reviewed by the Fully Compliance editorial team Short answer: Google Workspace includes strong security capabilities, but many are not enabled by default. Securing Workspace requires intentional configuration: integrate SSO with your identity provider, enforce MFA organization-wide, set up SPF/DKIM/DMARC email authentication, restrict file sharing to appropriate boundaries, configure
IT Infrastructure
Reviewed by the Fully Compliance editorial team Short answer: AWS gives you full control over your cloud infrastructure, which means security is entirely your responsibility from the operating system upward. Default configurations are not secure. You must intentionally build in IAM least-privilege access, restrictive security groups, private S3 buckets, encrypted
IT Infrastructure
Reviewed by the Fully Compliance editorial team Short answer: Microsoft 365 includes extensive security features, but default configuration is permissive rather than secure. Hardening M365 requires enforcing MFA for all users, implementing least-privilege identity management through Entra ID, configuring data loss prevention for sensitive data, enabling threat protection and audit
IT Infrastructure
Reviewed by the Fully Compliance editorial team Short answer: Azure provides the cloud platform, but securing what you build on it is entirely your responsibility. Security starts with identity management through Microsoft Entra ID and least-privilege RBAC, extends through restrictive network security groups and hardened virtual machines, and requires active
IT Infrastructure
Reviewed by the Fully Compliance editorial team Short answer: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS describe how much responsibility your cloud provider takes on versus how much sits on you. IaaS gives you virtual machines and you manage everything from the OS up. PaaS gives you a managed platform and you manage
IT Infrastructure
Reviewed by Marcus Chen, CISSP SD-WAN replaces expensive dedicated WAN circuits with software-controlled routing over commodity internet connections, cutting networking costs by 30 to 50% for multi-site organizations according to Gartner research. The technology has become the default for organizations with multiple locations because the cost savings are significant and
IT Infrastructure
Reviewed by Marcus Chen, CISSP Network monitoring is the intelligence layer that tells you whether your security controls are working, and organizations with comprehensive network monitoring detect breaches 53% faster according to the IBM 2023 Cost of a Data Breach report. Most organizations either do not monitor their networks at
IT Infrastructure
Reviewed by Marcus Chen, CISSP Network segmentation through VLANs limits the blast radius of any single compromise by preventing lateral movement across your network, and the 2023 Verizon DBIR found that organizations with proper segmentation contained breaches 59% faster than those with flat networks. Most organizations still run flat networks
IT Infrastructure
Reviewed by Marcus Chen, CISSP VPNs create encrypted tunnels for remote access, but their role is shifting as zero trust architectures replace network-level trust with identity-level verification. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 60% of enterprises will phase out most remote access VPNs in favor of zero trust network access. For