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Father’s IT System Is No More; Prevention Now A Growth Strategy

Father’s IT System Is No More; Prevention Now A Growth Strategy

Not so long ago, the term “business services” or “tech services” conjured up thoughts of a guy with a pocket protector making the rounds to fix a department’s laptops or a cadre of techno wizards resetting the network after a storm. That is no longer the case, and although those long-ago services are still part of the mix, today’s definition of business services extends more to artificial intelligence and cybersecurity than it does to maintaining individual devices. One might think of the space today as more focused on digital defense.

“My father and a partner started the business and at the time we were primarily helping with long-distance calling cost savings for our clients and, also, business telephone systems because computers just were not a huge part of the everyday office space,” said Ryan Flynn, CEO of North Little Rock-based Network Services Group. “Even when I started in 1998, computers were in everybody’s office, but it wasn’t the same world. [A computer] was barely connected to the internet. Email was lightly used, if at all, so what’s interesting is how we’ve evolved in a lot of ways from a telecommunications company into a managed services or IT support company.”

Ryan Flynn

The evolution is taking place all across the country as companies large and small come face to face with the realities of not only doing more and more of their business in the digital space but having to protect precious systems and data from unseen global adversaries.

Forge Institute in Little Rock addresses the digital new world order from a different perspective as a nonprofit that works with public and private organizations in three categories: workforce development, applied research to advance innovation, and enhancing organizational resiliency through collaboration across private- and public-sector entities.

The broad swath of business or technical services focuses on what the U.S. government defines as “critical infrastructure.” That encompasses systems, facilities and assets that are deemed essential to society and the economy. The key categories include transportation, utilities, communications, manufacturing, defense, emergency services, the energy sector, the chemical sector, commercial facilities and dams. It is pretty easy to determine that critical infrastructure gathers up just about everything that touches American life every day.

“What we saw about six years ago when we started was rapidly accelerating cyberattacks on businesses and critical infrastructure and an increasing need for skilled talent with keyboard or operational experience and collaborations to outpace the adversary,” said Lee Watson, chairman, CEO and founder of Forge Institute. “Basically, we saw a  significantly increasing dynamic cyber environment and not enough focus on workforce innovation or resiliency collaboration here in the United States, and so our programs work on that. Since then, we’ve also looked at doing risk management — what’s the economic growth opportunity to you? We don’t want to be ‘the glass is empty’ kind of organization; we want to worry about the risk, identify the risk, mitigate the risk but also look at what the growth opportunity emerging technologies like AI can bring.”

Lee Watson

Most every company is concerned about growth, but now growth is impacted by security. No organization can grow if their network is compromised, their data is held for ransom, or customer data has been stolen and is now housed in some corner of the dark web.

Flynn said the primary concern and what really drives people to work with companies such as Network Services Group is how secure and resilient their systems can be made in the event of a  breach or attack.

“It’s ‘How quickly can you guys get us back up and running?’ so I would say that we have evolved greatly into a cybersecurity company with huge emphasis on business continuity and disaster recovery,” he said, “just making sure that if somebody does get a virus or somebody does have a major malfunction, how quickly can we get them back up to work and going? That’s probably the biggest difference over the last five years. That’s really become the huge emphasis of what we’re offering and what we’re doing for our clients.”

Goals and objectives at Forge Institute are slightly different, primarily because the organization is a nonprofit. However, working with companies and government organizations to protect their intellectual property is still a key portion of the central goal.

“The advantages [of a nonprofit] are that we are uniquely positioned to work between the public and private sector, so sometimes we need to build technology to help solve the problem, but sometimes it’s a different type of collaboration,” Watson said. “Being a nonprofit not only allows us to better work with public and private sector organizations, but it’s also more conducive to creativity in how we solve those problems. If you’re a for-profit company, you raise capital, you need to be doing one thing, not 10 things — and scaling. While we’re growing very quickly, we’re growing in more of a consulting nonprofit sort of scenario.”

Larger organizations that work with Forge see a cybersecurity training partner, he added, but growth and visibility has allowed smaller businesses to see more capabilities, including cyber defense.

“The adversary is after you. They’re after your money, or they’re looking to cause disruption or harm,” Watson said. “You’ve got to have good passwords. You’ve got to have multifactor authentication. The truth is most people are still not doing those things, and it leads to the vast majority of the cyber incidents, including ransomware, that hit smaller organizations, so if there’s one thing I’d like a smaller organization to pay attention to, it’s focus. It’s time to do your part. It’s not just about protecting you, it’s about protecting your neighbor. All of our digital systems are interconnected, and it really takes all of us prioritizing cyber defense to keep the adversaries at bay.”

Larger companies may rely on vertical integration because they have the resource to staff extensive technical expertise, but not every organization has that option or is willing to staff to the levels necessary to combat the current threat environment.

“There are still people who just have a guy that fixes their stuff or a person that they know that’s really proficient with computers, and they bank on that,” Flynn said. “Earlier this year, we had a telephone systems client that had never used us for cybersecurity. They had a guy they knew well and could fix their network, but they ended up getting ransomware and losing some data. I’d say the biggest difference in what we do versus what other companies do is that we invest and spend a lot of money in cybersecurity.”

For Network Services Group and Forge Institute, security and doing research in security is a central part of their enterprises. A retailer, bank or restaurant chain is focused on the customer experience and expanding the business. Cybersecurity might be considered a distraction — until it is on the doorstep and the entire business comes to a halt.

“A person could say, ‘Hey, I’m going to make sure that you have antivirus, and we’re going to use spam filtering,’ and, in essence, that is a cybersecurity offering. What we’ve done is gone a few steps further, and we’ve looked for the best options regardless of cost, a focus on security tools,” Flynn said, “so in addition to antivirus, we use something called an endpoint detection and response program. It’s AI based. It’s in the cloud. Instead of looking for a flat file or something that’s known as a virus, it’s looking for different behaviors that are going on in your computer that are unusual — for example, if security logs are showing that your computer is uploading a bunch of information that might be considered unusual.”

A dedicated cybersecurity operation is looking at things like computer logs 24/7, so if cybersecurity companies see behavior change, not just a one-off incident, it can be explored and mitigated before it affects the network.

“We’ve also invested heavily in different security products like DNS security, which is helpful for all types of malware. The way malware normally works is somebody will download it off a website, or they’ll get it via email, and they’ll click a link that they shouldn’t have, and that will trigger the malware,” Flynn said. “That malware then needs to talk to its host, which is called an outbound DNS request, and we’re trying to kill those requests as they happen. In a lot of cases, we have users that have accidentally downloaded a virus, but our tools killed its ability to do anything so that we can remove it before it does any damage. There are a lot of different flavors of cybersecurity. We back it up with a tool stack that allows us to do a better job.”

Not everything in the data management and cybersecurity arena is focused on the adult world of ransomware and evil-doer malware. There are teaching opportunities, as well, including those for school-aged kids.

“In the workforce category, we have the Starbase Arkansas program, which is a collaboration with the 19th Airlift Wing at Little Rock Air Force Base to provide advanced [science, technology, engineering and math] and [integration of science, technology, engineering, the arts and math] programming for fifth-grade students in the area,” Watson said. “They come to the base for their fifth-grade class every week. It’s not a field trip; they’re actually meeting all of their academic requirements there at Starbase, so we start early, and then we have a program called the Forge Academy. In the Forge Academy, we do introductory multiweek boot camps all the way to advanced training. Most of that is in cybersecurity or cyber defense, but next year, we’re adding cloud and AI to the mix. Another big program is called the Forge Fellowship, a collaboration with the office of secretary of defense at the Pentagon and a program called SkillBridge.”

Within the fellowship, Forge Institute works with transitioning military service members who are within the last six months of ending their service. They apply to the program and, once selected, they receive training on the job and work-based learning experiences, something akin to an internship. Forge Institute  works with several Arkansas employers, assigning a participant in the program to each of them so workers can pick up on-the-job learning from particular industries in the state.

Finally, there is the Arkansas angle in all of the business service, cybersecurity, protect-what-I-have gamesmanship. The current operative term is “big data,” which leads to the question whether the Natural State is a big-data state.

“I think every state can be articulated now as a big-data state. What makes Arkansas interesting is that it probably punches above its weight on a per capita basis,” Watson said. “For a state with just over 3 million in population, we have some incredible organizations here that operate very important infrastructure that supports not only commerce in Arkansas but around the country.” 

READ ALSO: Arkansas Visionary: The Healer, Dr. Ali Krisht

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