{"id":209759,"date":"2026-05-05T07:07:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T11:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/05\/digital-first-office-technology-prioritizes-cybersecurity\/"},"modified":"2026-05-06T14:05:22","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T18:05:22","slug":"digital-first-office-technology-prioritizes-cybersecurity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/05\/digital-first-office-technology-prioritizes-cybersecurity\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital-First Office Technology Prioritizes Cybersecurity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Digital-First Office Technology Prioritizes Cybersecurity<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.thecannatareport.com\/articles\/office-technology-digital-pivot\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-05-05 07:07:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.thecannatareport.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Author: <\/a><\/p>\n

Using an unordered list, summarize the following article with between 4 and 8 key points. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t1.1K
\n\t\t\tAs traditionally print-centric office technology companies pivot to the digital reality, their cybersecurity services are moving to the forefront alongside hardware and managed print services. While artificial intelligence has become the latest and greatest threat to customer systems, often requiring that AI itself be deployed on the defensive side to combat breaches, human intelligence is needed to prevent age-old phishing schemes from taking root, dealers say.
\nConnectWise has two primary offerings in the cybersecurity space: SIEM, which handles security information and event management, and Managed EDR, which handles endpoint detection and response, said Jim Peterson, product marketing manager. These are designed to come together and create a larger protective blanket while leveraging agentic AI enhancements, and they can be managed 24-7 through expert incident response out of ConnectWise\u2019s security operations center (SOC), he said.
\nPeterson sees three primary motivations for bad actors who attempt to infiltrate the office technology space: encryption and ransomware, attempts to steal and sell data, and disruption of operations. \u201cHow they get in continues to change over time,\u201d he said. In the past, this often involved phishing attempts through email and its attachments, but now it\u2019s more likely to happen due to identity or credential abuse. \u201cThey login as me or you,\u201d he added. \u201cThat does not look suspicious.\u201d
\nWhile bad actors have been using artificial intelligence for a while, AI defenses have begun to catch up, Peterson believes. \u201cAI can go in and prove out whether it\u2019s a true or false positive, give us the next steps, look at the timeline, and get the specific course of action that either the ConnectWise SOC or the office technology company needs to execute,\u201d he said. \u201cIt can do that extremely quickly, with clarity in what actually needs to happen.\u201d
\nThat speedy response time is critical given how quickly threats propagate, and AI has helped to lower industry-wide mean time to respond (MTTR) to about eight minutes, Peterson said, adding that ConnectWise writes a 15-minute service guarantee into its contracts. But threats continue to shift, he noted, and when bad actors enter via identity abuse, they can stay in the environment without being noticed and then strike, otherwise known as \u201cliving off the land.\u201d
\nDon\u2019t forget network threats from equipment
\nWhile most office technology firms think endpoints first when they think of cybersecurity, and possibly email security next, Peterson suggested this approach often overlooks network threats revolving around office technology equipment that isn\u2019t Windows-based or patchable. And addressing vulnerabilities in that space is critical, especially for small to midsized businesses, he said.
\n\u201cThey\u2019re so focused on the endpoints and email, they forget the identity, network, and SAAS side,\u201d he said. \u201cOffice technology companies can put specific security in place to monitor and alert for threats in their specific environments and even do mitigation when vulnerabilities arise, whether it\u2019s simple things like segmentation, or decommission and patching, trying to maintain that equipment so that it doesn\u2019t add to their risks.\u201d
\nWhile identifying, protecting, detecting, and responding to cybersecurity threats are all important, office technology companies also need a recovery piece, Peterson said, adding that his company offers ConnectWise X360 Recovery for that purpose. \u201cGood offensive protection requires good defensive recovery,\u201d he said. \u201cWe want to fight the fight, but we also want to be able to recover businesses when we have to.\u201d
\nAll Covered, the managed services division of Konica Minolta, has an extensive portfolio of solutions to prevent and protect against threats, although bad actors\u2019 leveraging of AI has required a reevaluation of the threat landscape and redoubling of efforts, said Tara Swart, director of defensive security solutions. \u201cThat has upped efforts to design solutions that are attacking vulnerability management in a slightly different way,\u201d she said. \u201cOverall, the velocity of threats powered by AI has seen an exponential increase.\u201d
\nTo fight AI with AI, All Covered has been incorporating automated analysis of threat alerts through its SOC software, using a combination of tooling such as Google SecOps and SentinelOne for managed detection and response. This approach decreases the mean time to detect (MTTD) and MTTR, and thus \u201cgives less time to allow hackers to get a foothold into the organization,\u201d she added. The company also offers endpoint detection and response to roll back infections that attack from that vantage point. \u201cWe have great, talented people manning those tools,\u201d Swart said. \u201cWe operate 24\/7.\u201d
\nSwart interacts with another division of All Covered called depth security \u201con a monthly basis to find out how they\u2019re leveraging the hackers\u2019 toolset,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to get ahead of where we think the next breakthrough is going to be, from an AI perspective, and how it\u2019s influencing the threat landscape.\u201d
\nAnother important piece of the company\u2019s portfolio is its holistic approach to managing continuous threat exposure that brings together patching, scanning, consulting, and remediation work from expert engineers who are used to addressing cyber threats, which has also become especially important in the age of AI, Swart said. \u201cVulnerabilities in all software can be exploited easily by AI,\u201d she said. \u201cThe special sauce that leads that effort is a risk group. They\u2019re accustomed to taking those results and being able to consult with customers around what\u2019s the most important thing to address now, on down the line.\u201d
\nAll Covered also offers its clients managed security training, given that many breach incidents still come through phishing attacks via emails, and the company has a team that mans the KnowBe4 platform to prevent phishing emails and offer a proof point for email detection, Swart said.
\nOverall, Swart said the service providers that All Covered has selected have done well in embracing and leveraging AI, and she opined that those who don\u2019t will not survive. \u201cAI is ramping up so quickly on the offensive side, on the hacker side, [and] all these platform companies are still trying to catch up,\u201d she said. \u201cAs recently as eight months ago, we were still using AI primarily to help us with research and report writing. It really wasn\u2019t until three months ago that we saw some real, actionable changes in MTTR. \u2026 The pace of everything is going to change quickly.\u201d
\nPhishing emails and ransomware have recently impacted two large customers of dealer JD Young Technologies (Tulsa and Oklahoma City, OK) with 100-plus installations apiece, said Mike Milburn, vice president of information technology. \u201cIn both cases [the employee] thought it was legitimate, clicked on it and installed ransomware onto their PC,\u201d he said. \u201cThe ransomware sat there, incubated, waited, and, at the predetermined time, at 2:30 or 3 in the morning, it hatches, goes across the network, and locks up files and software. That experience is not a new experience for anybody in the managed service provider space.\u201d
\nOne office technology dealer\u2019s story
\nOffice technology companies can mitigate such possibilities, but they cannot entirely foreclose upon them, no matter how much other cybersecurity protection they provide, Milburn said. And when an employee slips up, \u201cthey\u2019re going to get something,\u201d he said of the hackers. \u201cIt\u2019s a matter of how you recover.\u201d
\nWhen a breach occurs, the cyber-insurance provider sends its adjuster team to look at the network, figure out where it happened, whether the managed service provider or the client caused the problem\u2014and then asks what needs to happen to prevent it in the future, Milburn said. After doing mitigation work for two or three weeks around the clock, they depart.
\n\u201cThey impose rules on us,\u201d he said. \u201cYou have two groups in a disaster scenario both calling themselves the cybersecurity provider. One is the mitigation team, [asking], \u2018How bad is it? How much money are we going to pay you?\u2019 Then you\u2019ve got us sitting over here. We\u2019re managing the network.\u201d
\nMost managed service IT providers, like JD Young, provide services that tend to be labeled as \u201cour cybersecurity suite,\u201d such as email or endpoint protection, Milburn said. \u201cIs your computer doing something bizarre at 2:30 in the morning that it shouldn\u2019t be doing?\u201d he asked. \u201cIs somebody from Bulgaria logging into your network?\u201d
\nBut many clients can\u2019t be talked into paying for the full suite, aside from some larger customers, and Milburn wishes others would. \u201cI don\u2019t like it. I want them to step up,\u201d he said. \u201cThey pay for the bare basics at most.\u201d
\n\u00a0<\/p>\n

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