Is Your Security Worth 25 Cents a Day? [List]

Shawn Akins • October 5, 2017

Security is at the forefront of every business owner and IT department. For as little as 25 cents a day, your organization can dramatically increase your networks security. Below is a list of items to get you started, all for under 25 cents/day/user and some are FREE! Who doesn’t love FREE?

1. Train your end users (FREE). A great way to test out your end users is to run a phishing test. Phishing is the attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and, indirectly, money), often for malicious reasons, by disguising as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. 91% of successful data breaches started with a spear-phishing attack. Contact Us for a free phishing test.

2. Run your Office 365 Secure Score (FREE). If you are on Office 365, run your security score. If you aren’t on Office 365, you really need to be. Unless you are a Fortune 500 company, you aren’t providing the security that Microsoft is, Contact Us and we’ll get you migrated. Secure Score will provide you with a list of security recommendations that you can begin implementing to increase your score, thereby increasing your security. More details in this previous blog: https://www.akinsit.com/whats-security-score/. Some of these recommendations you can do now as part of your Office 365. Others may require Microsoft Enterprise Mobility and Security (EMS).

3. Purchase and Implement Microsoft Enterprise Mobility and Security (about $0.25/user/day). What can EMS do for your organization?

Ability to Encrypt Emails: Quit sending credit card info unencrypted, EMS can automatically do this. Also, sensitive emails regarding HR or Finances can be encrypted either automatically or on the fly. I use this EVERY DAY!
Multi Factor Authentication: Jaime wrote a great article on this https://www.akinsit.com/multi-factor-authentication)
Detect who your riskiest users are: great blog by Chris on this https://www.akinsit.com/companys-riskiest-user/)
Provide users with Single SignOn: One of my favorites. Ditch the passwords written on post-its and let your users sign in once to access all the websites they need to get their job done. This feature alone pays for the quarter!
Protect documents using Data Loss Prevention (DLP): don’t let those sensitive or proprietary documents get into the wrong hands. EMS allows you to encrypt them in place and in transit and only allow the intended recipients to open.

4. Self-service password reset: Your helpdesk will love you for this. Allowing your users to reset their passwords themselves. Did you know on average 25% of helpdesk tickets are password resets?

5. Perform a Security Audit (NOT FREE): Performing a security audit will capture all of the weaknesses on your network. While this is not free, you get what you pay for. Contact Us or any other IT Security firm TODAY! One breach can bankrupt your business.

Download e-book Extend Office 365 with EMS

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AWS stumbled this morning. Here’s why multi‑cloud keeps you moving.

By Shawn Akins • October 20, 2025

October 20, 2025 — Early today, Amazon Web Services experienced a major incident centered in its US‑EAST‑1 (N. Virginia) region. AWS reports the event began around 12:11 a.m. PT and tied back to DNS resolution affecting DynamoDB , with mitigation within a couple of hours and recovery continuing thereafter. As the outage rippled, popular services like Snapchat, Venmo, Ring, Roblox, Fortnite , and even some Amazon properties saw disruptions before recovering. If your apps or data are anchored to a single cloud, a morning like this can turn into a help‑desk fire drill. A multi‑cloud or cloud‑smart approach helps you ride through these moments with minimal end‑user impact. What happened (and why it matters) Single‑region fragility: US‑EAST‑1 is massive—and when it sneezes, the internet catches a cold. Incidents here have a history of wide blast radius. Shared dependencies: DNS issues to core services (like DynamoDB endpoints) can cascade across workloads that never directly “touch” that service. Multi‑cloud: practical resilience, not buzzwords For mid‑sized orgs, schools, and local government, multi‑cloud doesn’t have to mean “every app in every cloud.” It means thoughtful redundancy where it counts : Multi‑region or multi‑provider failover for critical apps Run active/standby across AWS and Azure (or another provider), or at least across two AWS regions with automated failover. Start with citizen‑facing portals, SIS/LMS access, emergency comms, and payment gateways. Portable platforms Use Kubernetes and containers, keep state externalized, and standardize infra with Terraform/Ansible so you can redeploy fast when a region (or a provider) wobbles. (Today’s DNS hiccup is exactly the kind of scenario this protects against.) Resilient data layers Replicate data asynchronously across clouds/regions; choose databases with cross‑region failover and test RPO/RTO quarterly. If you rely on a managed database tied to one region, design an escape hatch. Traffic and identity that float Use global traffic managers/DNS to shift users automatically; keep identity (MFA/SSO) highly available and not hard‑wired to a single provider’s control plane. Run the playbook Document health checks, automated cutover, and comms templates. Then practice —tabletops and live failovers. Many services today recovered within hours, but only teams with rehearsed playbooks avoided user‑visible downtime. The bottom line Cloud concentration risk is real. Outages will happen—what matters is whether your constituents, students, and staff feel it. A pragmatic multi‑cloud stance limits the blast radius and keeps your mission‑critical services online when one provider has a bad day. Need a resilience check? Akins IT can help you prioritize which systems should be multi‑cloud, design the right level of redundancy, and validate your failover plan—without overspending. Let’s start with a quick, 30‑minute review of your most critical services and RPO/RTO targets. (No slideware, just actionable next steps.)