We take our gold-level partnership with Cisco seriously.

C Spire Business invests time and many other resources to cultivating the Cisco relationship, which makes us a better IT provider for industries like education and government. So we are pleased to announce that Cisco is recognizing that dedication by naming C Spire Business the Southeast's Cisco 2018 Partner of the Year.

C Spire Business was selected for our innovation, leadership and best practices in the area of state, local, and education (SLED) information technology sales and service and as a valued Cisco business partner, according to Don Monistere, General Manager of C Spire Business.

It's undeniable that cloud computing and outsourcing have resulted in better margins and higher profits for businesses over the past 10 years. However, data breaches have continued to plague companies around the globe with no end in immediate sight. This begs the obvious question: Could there be some relation between the two?

Meet our Cybersecurity Consulting Group! This team partners with organizations to help identify, quantify, and eliminate business risk as it relates to security.

Social media giant Facebook recently announced 30 million users' personal information was compromised.

That’s terrible, right? Well, factor this: Facebook has 2.2 billion active user accounts, and the initial reports indicated the hack only impacted 90 million.

Most companies freely acknowledge that a data breach event would cause significant impact to their business. If a company processes, stores and accesses sensitive customer information (i.e. medical records, credit cards, social security numbers, etc.), it would also acknowledge that it already knows what types of data the criminals mostly like want to steal … or hold hostage.

Passwords do not receive the respect they deserve as a first line of defense against threats. Roughly 60 percent of confirmed data breaches involve weak, stolen, or default passwords. Most businesses provide little to no training for employees around selecting secure passwords, so it's no surprise that "123456", "password", "qwerty", and "Star Wars" are commonly used.