The recent global cyber attack has highlighted the dependence of many logistics companies, large and small, on vulnerable IT services and the impact security breaches can have. Even FedEx reported that it had been a victim of the attack.

Ken Lyon, technology expert at Transport Intelligence recommends as follows:

Ensure all operating systems running on machines in the company are kept up to date with the latest security patches. Firewalls should be correctly configured to allow only appropriate content to be passed in or out of the network onto the internet.

Explore the migration of productivity solutions (such as email, MS Office, etc.) onto their cloud based servers managed by either Microsoft with their Office 365 service, Google G Suite for their Office equivalent, and others.

Speak to your operational application vendors to see if they provide true elastic compute cloud versions of your existing applications. If they suggest hosting your solutions on a dedicated server inside their data center, that may be somewhat acceptable, but it is only a halfway house. Unless they are prepared to sign up for the full management and security of the server 24 x 7, explore using a full cloud-based solution.