BAU and Cyber Security: What It Means to SMBs

At cuick trac™, we believe BAU is crucial to an organization’s Cyber Security, specifically small-to-medium size businesses (SMBs)

What does BAU stand for? To us, it means a few different things.

Business As Usual

BAU is our de facto mission to help small and medium sized businesses stay safe from the cyber attacks.  Our solutions are additive to the success of a SMBs, as we do not sell security by interference.

We provide information security and cyber security solutions to help you succeed.

Troubadour Woody Guthrie recorded the unforgettable campfire anthem “This Land Is Your Land” in 1944, while on shore leave from the Merchant Marine. Just a couple of months later, Allied forces would hit the Normandy beaches to end the Nazi scourge.

The Bauhuas was a Weimar Republic era art school in Germany that, before it was closed under pressure from the nascent Nazi regime, taught an ideals based design ethos, seeking to blend crafts and arts into one holistic construct of design and building things – like a house.

Thus, you have “BAU-haus.”

Perhaps we should be talking about better Business As Usual, which means more secure, thus more success.

Because of our work with SMBs, we are very aware that SMB’s need our help. According to incyberdefense.com:

“ … in 2018 there were 58.9 million small to medium sized businesses in the U.S. that employ almost half (47.5%) the nation’s workforce. And, they were the target of 2 out of 3 of all cyber crimes.”

Cuick trac™ Appreciates Uncertainty

Think of the small business that is already engaged in, or interested in selling it’s products or services to an entity involved in the defense of our land. It is a daunting degree of uncertainty.

The DFARS clause, coupled with the 110 control families set forth in NIST SP 800-171 (revision 2 is on the way), are not in the wheelhouse of most SMB business owners.

And it appears almost certain, that the US Federal Government will mandate compliance with the NIST standard for any government contract, not just defense.

If you find yourself waiting for the government to relax cyber security standards compliance, is a sure lost wager.

Which puts the SMB business owner, who likely is not an expert in information security, in a bind.

Who to turn to?

Cuick trac™. We will not hinder your ongoing journey of true cyber security compliance, we will help you every step of the journey.

Bold, Affirmative, Undeterred

Contractor-Suppliers in the supply chain to the US Government are, much like their counterparts in the US economy, most often small business owners. They are time-pressed, over-stressed hard working people who know that cyber security is important.

That said, it is difficult to prioritize something that seems technical, transient and cloaked in mysterious jargon when the SMB owner needs to focus on the daily work, and covering payroll.

The demands of Business As Usual are hard to supplant with cyber chimeras.

These contractors need budget friendly solutions that safeguard the security of their information, and that of their employees, customers and vendors.

Contractors know that by virtue of being a cog in the government supply chain, they broaden the attack surface for foreign bad actors.  By operating any aspect of their business online, they open new attack vectors.

And they know they are not amateur information security professionals.

Most of these SMB’s are very patriotic souls and would be mortified if their business operations, compromised information necessary to our collective national security, were to be disrupted.

That fear is a motivator to harden their defenses.

Our solutions do not interfere with business as usual, rather we strengthen the confidentiality, integrity and accessibility of the SMB’s essential information.

We collaborated with other security and information technology companies, to offer the first fully compliant, cost-effective, DFARS/NIST 800-171 solution for SMBs.

We call it, cuick trac™.

Better Add Utility

A century ago, Bauhaus principles informed how things were designed and built. They encouraged their students to embrace modern technologies in order to succeed in a modern environment.

The Bauhaus style eschewed ornamentation, and embraced the ideal that form and function were united in the design of an object or a building.

Business As Usual does not get in the way. It is an utilitarian mindset. When security works, it does not stop work.

Some cyber security solutions in the marketplace seem to slow internal discord and division.

For SMBs, cuick trac™ is DFARS compliance as a utility.

Bold, Aggressive, Undaunted

Cuick trac™ is honored to help SMB business owners get their house in order, so that Business As Usual will keep those SMB businesses standing, growing, thriving.

Our 16th president reminded us long ago, that a house divided cannot stand.

This land is our land, we owe it to her, our customers, our employees, our vendors and our families to keep it secure.