Cybersecurity Playbook for Multifamily Housing I.T. Enterprises
The U.S. multifamily property management industry encompasses 40 million multifamily units valued at $3 trillion. More than 800,000 people work as employees of the management industry, while tech and service vendor companies employ hundreds of thousands more. And the industry is growing, requiring 4 million more units by 2030 just to keep up with demand. (Source: https://www.forbes.com).
Say you’re one of those hundreds of thousands who has just been given the reins of an I.T. infrastructure in multifamily housing property management, and you don’t know where to start from a cybersecurity perspective. Well, this is your lucky day, because we’re here to take you from zero to hero in a few easy steps. Okay, well, they’re not that easy, and there are significant costs involved, but hopefully you will come away enlightened and prepared to justify your cyber budget to executive management.
Step 1: Identify Critical Data. And determine where it is: on premises, in the cloud, with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider, and elsewhere. For example, a typical company might host its own Microsoft Exchange Server, or else it might be using Microsoft 365 online or Google Workspace. The corporate file server may be in the data center, or in AWS or Azure, or maybe it’s hosted with DropBox. Corporate finance might be hosted on-premises or in the cloud with Oracle NetSuite or Microsoft Dynamics 365, CRM with SalesForce or Pipedrive, property management and customer payments with RealPage, Yardi, or Entrata. Don’t forget social media, websites, and other places that I.T. might ……
Say you’re one of those hundreds of thousands who has just been given the reins of an I.T. infrastructure in multifamily housing property management, and you don’t know where to start from a cybersecurity perspective. Well, this is your lucky day, because we’re here to take you from zero to hero in a few easy steps. Okay, well, they’re not that easy, and there are significant costs involved, but hopefully you will come away enlightened and prepared to justify your cyber budget to executive management.
Step 1: Identify Critical Data. And determine where it is: on premises, in the cloud, with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider, and elsewhere. For example, a typical company might host its own Microsoft Exchange Server, or else it might be using Microsoft 365 online or Google Workspace. The corporate file server may be in the data center, or in AWS or Azure, or maybe it’s hosted with DropBox. Corporate finance might be hosted on-premises or in the cloud with Oracle NetSuite or Microsoft Dynamics 365, CRM with SalesForce or Pipedrive, property management and customer payments with RealPage, Yardi, or Entrata. Don’t forget social media, websites, and other places that I.T. might ……