The Road Ahead
With the IT landscape continuing to change on a daily basis, MHK is doing everything possible to ensure that you, our clients, don't get left behind. We have been working diligently behind the scenes to discover, test, and ultimately implement the best products to offer in our stack (managed service products), along with some other innovative and upgraded systems, which will allow us to better serve you as an extension of your company. This blog post aims to provide a detailed look at what's in the works for the final weeks of 2024, and how we plan to implement this for all of our clients for the start of 2025.
The Stack
As hinted earlier, we have been revamping our stack and have completed the lengthy and meticulous process of creating what we believe is the most comprehensive, secure platform we can offer our Managed Services clients at this point in time. This was all done with a central focus on security, while also focusing on providing a financially viable option for all of our existing clients. The revamped stack will provide much more protection and security to your infrastructures and will allow us to shrink the attack surface considerably for possible malicious actors. Below you will find the upgraded and added features of our general stack, which will be rolled out to ALL existing Managed Services clients:
- UPGRADE: Our endpoint security offering will now feature a 24/7/365 hands on keyboard Security Operations Center (SOC), which will review, stop, and remediate malicious threats that require an immediate, hands-on approach. This is key to stopping ransomware attacks in their tracks as well as live off the land lateral attacks. Sleep easy knowing that your systems have human eyes on them every second of the day.
- UPGRADE: Our anti-spam/anti-phishing platform has been upgraded to a new all-in-one solution, providing full protection from spam, marketing, junk, phishing, credential harvesting, and business email compromise (BEC) attacks. This state-of-the-art API connection provides direct connectivity to your email platform instead of requiring mail to flow through in the old methods of record changes to pass through a filter.
- ADDITION: Security awareness training is a key service to evaluate and educate employees on reducing their personal surface attack area, teaching them how to recognize phishing emails, fraudulent links and websites, and general personally identifiable information (PII) harvest attacks. Access micro trainings at your leisure to keep your score up on a ranking from 0-850, just like a credit score. The trainings are fun, intuitive, and take less than 5 minutes to complete. The platform also provides Dark Web monitoring, which continuously scans monitors the Dark Web, alerting you of breaches, which minimizes the organizations risk of data theft, convincing phishing attacks, and password exposure, potentially linking bad actors to your sensitive company data. Allow us to bring the Dark Web to light
- ADDITION: Privileged Access Management (PAM) is a newer strategy in the broadening cybersecurity landscape, which allows standard users to request elevated access for business functions in the click of a button, which allows us to approve or deny it just as quickly. This secures your infrastructure by removing all local administrative privileges from the end user computers if they already have them for security, and also allows a timely request to update a platform when needed, such as a pestering QuickBooks update. No longer will an email or phone call need to be placed, just launch the program and a request will be blasted to our users immediately to approve or deny the request within seconds. The best part? This offering checks a box on cybersecurity insurance questionnaires, allowing you a better chance at expanding your claims limits!
What does this mean?
MHK has always continued to strive for excellence, which translates to giving our clients the most for their money. We recognized the changes going on, so we took this innovative approach to roll out our new stack on a per-user basis for Managed Services. As opposed to our sunsetting method of billing per-device, a per-user structure allows you to scale your IT services as you scale, providing you more financial control of your IT services.
The Name
MHK Consultants, Inc has been a staple name for over 30 years and is well respected in your vertical. The name isn't changing, and we aren't going anywhere. We have, however, recognized that the name is a little "wordy," so we've made a decision to shorten our domain name to make it easier to read, type, and understand over the phone. Our new domain will be mhkmsp.com, which will take primary precedence on our emails as well as our website. The mhkconsultants.com domain will still work and route to our site and emails, but you will see the new domain appear in communications going forward.
What does this mean?
Nothing will change on your end - keep emailing us and accessing our website! Just note that when you see mhkmsp.com appear, that it's still the same friendly group of people you've come to know over the years.
The Agreements
With the updates to the stack and provided services, our previously signed engagement letters need to be refreshed with new verbiage. These new agreements will be Master Service Agreements (or MSAs) and will clearly outline MHK's responsibilities and service offerings for our revamped stack.
What does this mean?
MHK will send out our new MSAs to all clients directly within the next couple of weeks, which will require a signature by December 15, 2024, to continue services with MHK Consultants, Inc.
