We understand human error is unavoidable, but we can certainly plan for it and do everything we can to counteract it. In addition to accounting for errors, we also need to defend businesses against the possibility of data breaches. Many SMBs make the mistake of thinking they are too small to hack, but a little over a quarter of data breach victims are small businesses, and the results are especially damaging to these organizations. The effects of poor security measures could result in substantial trouble for the future.
The more important the purpose of a tool is, the more stringent the plan must be to protect it.
We have three levels of criticality:
1. It’s important to protect your environment from viruses
Antivirus, antispam, security training, crypto prevent, content filtering, remote access and other tools are all important to daily operations and security. We have two departments that audit them following our documented procedures in SweetProcess:
- Our System Analysts deeply inspect and ensure all tools are set up to meet our standard on a monthly basis.
- Our Technology Officers audit your setup on a quarterly basis.
2. Critical monitoring helps identify hackers quickly
Critical elements include patching and monitoring. Patching is critical in reducing security and productivity loss risks, while proactive monitoring is critical in identifying issues before they negatively impact you and your staff. We have three departments that audit patching and monitoring following our documented procedures in SweetProcess:
- Our System Analysts deeply inspect and ensure the two are set up to our standard on a monthly basis.
- Our Technology Officers audit your setup on a quarterly basis.
- Our Security Manager audits patching and monitoring once a week across 100% of our clients.
When it comes to keeping an eye on things, we offer proactive network and device monitoring throughout Chicago and the surrounding areas.
3. Mission Critical: be prepared when/if the worst happens
Mission-critical aspects include backup and disaster recovery. They are the most critical as they are the last layer of defense when all else fails. We have three departments that audit backup and disaster recovery following our documented procedures in SweetProcess:
- Our System Analysts thoroughly inspect these aspects and make sure they meet our standards each month. They also perform a quarterly disaster recovery test to simulate a disaster and validate you can recover from it.
- Our Technology Officers audit your setup every quarter.
- Our Security Manager audits backup and disaster recovery for compliance twice a week for all of our clients.
All of XL.net reviews the results of backup and disaster recovery compliance audits across all our clients on a weekly basis:

When we detect failures from our audits, we learn from them by performing an ISO 9001-level incident report and consider all issues to be process issues. Growth is the name of the game at XL.net, and we take careful measures to understand how and why any issues occur and prevent them from happening again.