Systemic Digital Inc

Remote work didn't just change where your people work. It changed what your IT infrastructure has to protect.

The perimeter model — where everything inside the office network was trusted and everything outside wasn't — doesn't map to a workforce that's split between home offices, coffee shops, and client sites. The attack surface got bigger and harder to define.

The costs that don't show up on an IT invoice: shadow IT tools your remote team adopted because the approved ones were too slow, personal devices being used for work because nobody enforced the policy, VPN configurations that were patched together quickly in 2020 and never properly reviewed.

If your IT setup looks like it was designed for an office that no longer exists the way it used to, it probably was.

The software update your IT team approved last Tuesday could be the entry point.

Supply chain attacks work by compromising a trusted vendor's product before it reaches you. You install the update. The update is legitimate. It also contains something that shouldn't be there. Your security tools don't flag it because the source is trusted.

This isn't theoretical. SolarWinds happened in 2020. MOVEit happened in 2023. The pattern is consistent and the frequency is increasing.

You don't have to understand every attack to know that "we only install software from trusted vendors" is no longer a complete answer on its own.

Antivirus software works by recognizing threats it has already seen. That's a reasonable approach when the threat is a known virus someone catalogued last month.

It's a less useful approach when the threat is custom malware written specifically to avoid the signatures your antivirus is checking against.

MDR — Managed Detection and Response — works differently. It monitors behavior, not just known signatures. It looks for what a threat is doing, not just what it looks like. If something on your network starts acting like ransomware before it's been classified as ransomware, MDR catches it.

Antivirus and MDR aren't the same product at different price points. They solve different problems.