Safety Detectives: Please share your company background, how you got started, and your mission.
Empowered IT Solutions: Empowered IT Solutions was born from the merging of two concepts that occurred during our founder’s Joaquin Hernandez career while working with the largest telecom manufacturer company in the world.
- Understanding the full benefits of the “Managed Services” concept as a way to eliminate clients’ headaches when it came to equipment purchase/obsolescence and access to expensive support services. With “Managed Services” the small and mid-size owner can buy hardware, software, and advanced services in a very effective and efficient way; by sharing the large costs that usually only enterprises can afford.
- Experiencing IT support frustration while preparing multimillion-dollar proposals in several countries for the large telecom corporation. When put in perspective, the founder thought about what a small business owner would have to deal with who does not have access to the number of resources that large corporations do; the frustration and exposure could be enormous!
Taking those two things into consideration, Joaquin realized there was a great opportunity to help small businesses with their IT and security using the concept of Managed Services. This way of business could give the small business owners access to top-level IT support, monitoring, proactive remediation, and cyber-security that the large enterprises have but with a piece of the cost, making it very affordable.
Our Mission: to be our clients’ trusted IT & Cybersecurity partner through competitive state-of-the-art solutions and personalized customer attention.
SD: What is the main service your company offers?
Empowered IT Solutions: We offer a partnership. We want to be organizations’ trusted cybersecurity and IT partner. We specialize in helping small and medium-size business strengthen their cybersecurity, business continuity, and network performance by monitoring and proactively remediating any possible cyber-threats or system issues.
SD: What is something unique that helps you stay ahead of your competition?
Empowered IT Solutions: We understand the importance of information risk management that comes with living in a digital world. We start out by understanding our clients’ needs through a consulting meeting. We assess their current environment and business goals in order to identify clients’ risk levels and vulnerabilities, define priorities in terms of business goals, and that way tailor and implement the controls they need.
Our goal is to create a comprehensive solution that integrates IT operations, risk management, and compliance.
SD: What do you think are the worst cyberthreats today?
Empowered IT Solutions: We believe the biggest threat comes from people not being well informed when it comes to cybersecurity. Companies will buy the latest and greatest solutions to deal with constantly-evolving malware, but if the people using them aren’t knowledgeable in cybersecurity best practices, those solutions won’t work to the best of their abilities. Cyber-criminals only have to get through once to be successful in their hacking endeavors, meanwhile, we have to be on it and protected all the time, 24/7 without fail. That is a big feat to undertake and that’s why cybersecurity is a team effort- it falls on everyone, not just the IT team.
Also, the belief of small business owners is that because they are small enough, they are not a good target for threat actors. Because of this, they don’t prioritize the controls until an incident occurs.