March 22, 2024 - This week’s notables
Infrastructure & Support
CMMC stands for Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, a framework that aims to ensure the security of the defense industrial base and its supply chain. The newly available rules for certification have been released and are moving towards publication. Enforecement of the rules will beging six months after that are published. The rules specify the levels of cybersecurity maturity that contractors need to achieve in order to bid on Department of Defense contracts. Ricky is taking a refresher course on the CMMC rules and technical details for implementation. CMMS builds on the NIST 800-171 controls, and is concentrated on the documentation of compliance with those controls. The course is being hosted by the PA SBDC and Southeast PA APEX Accelerator. Since we’re providing cybersecurity services to clients who are DoD contractors, inWorks LLC will be continuing to work on achieving compliance.
Devices
There were no device-specific news on our end this week, but here’s a couple of developments in our partner ecosystem:
Xerox announced a new line of multifunction devices that offer enhanced security, cloud connectivity, and sustainability features. The Xerox AltaLink C8100 and Xerox AltaLink B8100 series are designed to help businesses streamline their workflows and reduce their environmental impact.
HP launched a new service called HP Wolf Security, which combines its hardware, software, and services to provide comprehensive endpoint protection for customers. HP Wolf Security leverages the security capabilities of HP's devices, such as self-healing BIOS and threat containment, and integrates them with cloud-based threat intelligence and monitoring.
➡️ It’s great that HP is doing that – we’re way ahead of them! All PCs that inWorks LLC provides to customers already come preconfigured with a year of WatchGuard EPDR – the new standard in anti-virus, anti-malware, and anti-ransomware solutions.
Yealink introduced a new video conferencing solution called Yealink MeetingEye 600, which is a smart video device that supports 4K resolution, 20x optical zoom, and AI-powered features. The device can automatically track and frame speakers, adjust lighting and color, and eliminate background noise.
Operations & Growth
We’ve been working with Power Automate workflows quite a bit, and one major weakness that we identified is a centralized error management for an organization’s workflows. Power Automate has been seeing amazing adoption (“sprawl” would be another appropriate word to use), and there’s not a lot of governance information out there that helps power users create robust workflows. Central Error Management for Power Automate is one of the better practices we recommend (and are starting to implement), and with that in mind we spent a few hours publishing an Azure Marketplace offering to help customers drive adoption of this practice. The offering is a one-day workshop where we’ll provide guidance on setting up Central Error Management – whether self-hosted or managed by inWorks LLC – and at the end of the day the customer will have end-user training along with a simple implementation of the process.
Information Radiation
Starting next week (March 20th), our weekly internal Information Radiation and Operations & Growth meetings will swap days. The reason for this change so that on Thursday, we can capture a summary of updates and news from our daily meetings to share here, in our substack newsletter. Look for this weekly update to get a look behind the scenes at what we’re up to!