The most common route into an SME network is not a sophisticated attack — it is a firewall setting that was wrong from the start, or that drifted over time. Nicholas Broderick explains how benchmarking against CIS standards turns assumption into accountability.
Risk Management
When Your Hosting Provider Gets Hacked: The DNS Security Risk Most Businesses Never See Coming
A travel consultancy contacted Si Futures because they could not send or receive email — not because of anything they had done wrong, but because their hosting provider had been compromised. This is the DNS security risk most businesses never think about: the infrastructure you rely on sits in someone else’s hands, and their security posture becomes yours by default
Cyber Essentials Is No Longer Optional: What UK SMEs Need to Know Before April 27
The UK Cyber Essentials scheme gets significantly stricter on April 27. Si Futures examines what the changes mean for UK SMEs, why certification is increasingly the price of entry in the UK market, and what businesses need to do before the deadline.
The Resilience Gap: Why Your Network Fails When It Matters Most
After thirty years managing networks across the UK and South Africa, Si Futures examines why business connectivity resilience consistently fails — and the five questions every IT leader should be asking before their next board meeting.
Telling You Before It Breaks: What Proactive IT Management Really Looks Like
An expired SSL certificate on a Friday afternoon shouldn’t be a surprise. Automated monitoring with tiered 30/14/7 day notification thresholds replaced manual tracking, while REST API integration opened firewall policy hygiene analysis — identifying dead rules that create unnecessary security gaps across client estates.
When Your MSP Catches What Your Carrier Missed: Handover Documentation Failures
When carrier documentation says one thing but your monitoring data says another, who do you trust? This investigation into six months of unexplained packet loss reveals why every carrier handover needs systematic verification—and how three documentation errors in a single handover can misdirect your entire monitoring strategy.
Why are humans the biggest insider threat to your business?
Human error remains the leading cause of data breaches. Understanding the three types of insider threats and implementing effective security awareness training transforms employees from vulnerabilities into your strongest security asset.
Free Security Tools: Starting Conversations Without Sales Pressure
We’ve just made three security assessment tools permanently available on our website, and the philosophy behind them matters more than the tools themselves.
Infrastructure Concentration in Connectivity Architecture: Understanding Shared Dependencies
Infrastructure concentration happens naturally as connectivity ecosystems mature. As cable systems land and interconnection points develop, businesses naturally cluster where that infrastructure exists. This creates efficiency and cost advantages – but it can also create dependencies that aren’t immediately obvious when you’re buying connectivity from multiple “redundant” providers.
