Category: solutions

Steps to Prevent Ransomware Attacks

Following are the four primary steps for such a defense:

Identify: NIST Special Publication (SP) 1800-25, Data Integrity: Identifying and Protecting Assets Against Ransomware and Other Destructive Events discusses ways to maintain awareness of organizational assets, including how to use technologies for vulnerability detection, management solutions and policy enforcements. This is particularly critical for health-care providers, which have had to deploy additional equipment, users and data quickly to serve more patients during the pandemic — and have added vulnerabilities in doing so.

Protect: Especially in the current environment, keeping equipment operational is critical. Also in NIST SP 1800-25, IT staff will find steps to maintain system and data integrity, including preventing attacks before they can occur. This involves technology such as those found in zero trust networking, including network segmentation, and proper privilege management.

Detect and Respond: Organizations must carefully monitor their infrastructure. This may be particularly challenging for health-care organizations as their day-to-day operations become more chaotic. NIST SP 1800-26, Data Integrity: Detecting and Responding to Ransomware and Other Destructive Events discusses ways to discover attacks and react to them quickly. This guidance shows how file integrity and network monitoring solutions can enable IT staff to recognize attacks as they occur, rather than wait for bad actors to reveal themselves.

Recover: As hard as IT staff may try, adversaries can be difficult to detect. NIST SP 1800-11, Data Integrity: Recovering from Ransomware and Other Destructive Events explains how robust backup and restoration technologies can help an organization weather an attack without having to pay a ransom.

These recommendations and guidance apply broadly. Health-care organizations, firefighters, police, and many other state and local entities can use this information to protect against ransomware attacks. State and local governments, some of which use local managed service providers to maintain their information infrastructures, often lack the cyber security resources typical at the federal government agencies. These free resources should be passed along to any staff or consultants that are providing cyber security services to ensure best practices and preventive measures are in place.

We are glad that to announce our OS4 Contract. Office Supply Fourth Generation (OS4)

Contract Number: 47QSEA20D007B

Effective : 06/5/2020 thru 06/4/2025

Special Item Number (SIN): 339940OS4

SIN 339940OS4 (formerly SIN 75 220)  Enhanced SIN for Office Products and Services

The Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiative for Office Supplies Fourth Generation (FSSI OS4) is GSA’s latest FSSI solution and has been named Best-in-Class (BIC) for office supplies by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). It is comprised of two Enhanced Special Item Numbers (SINs). They are purchasing channel solutions that help federal customers achieve significant savings on their office supply purchases. The awards are the result of a collaborative team effort among customer agencies across the federal government.

This solution provides an opportunity to achieve significant savings and meet sustainable acquisition and other socioeconomic goals. A major objective of this solution is to increase opportunities for small business participation by at least five percent (5%).

Additional benefits include:

• Aligning purchasing with existing agency procurement practices;
• Capturing economies of scale;
• Consolidating orders with the new delivery order discounts feature and save as discounts are triggered on individual orders;
• Enabling achievement of socioeconomic goals;
• Ensuring compliance with applicable regulations to include the Ability One program, sustainable purchasing requirements, and the Trade Agreement Act;
• Fostering markets for sustainable technologies and environmentally preferable products;
• Providing ease of ordering;
• Providing point of sale compliance, ensuring that purchase card users automatically receive the OS4 price; and
• Simplifying data collection and enhancing transparency by enabling agencies to better manage expenditures and measure cost avoidance.

Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiative (FSSI)

Strategic sourcing is the structured and collaborative process of critically analyzing an organization’s spending patterns to better leverage its purchasing power, reduce costs, and improve overall performance. The primary goals of FSSI are to:

• Strategically source across federal agencies;
• Establish mechanisms to increase total cost savings, value, and socioeconomic participation;
• Collaborate with industry to develop optimal solutions;
• Share best practices; and
• Create a strategic sourcing community of practice

Contract Details:

4 Office Products and Supplies Offerors may offer their entire commercial catalog, or may offer a select, limited line of office products. Office products include, but are not limited to items such as: pens, pencils, markers, xerographic paper, printer paper, fax paper, 3D printing filaments and resins, binders, tape, envelopes, shredders, helical-scan, longitudinally oriented video tapes, video cassettes, reel to reel audio tapes, blank endless loop audio cartridge tapes, magnetic tape audio recording cassette, computer tape, reel, cartridge, cassette, diskettes, disk packs, disk cartridges, anti-glare/anti-radiation screens (VDT), ergonomic workstations products, cleaning equipment and supplies (head cleaners, disk drive cleaners, monitor cleaners, toner wipes, mini-vacuums, etc.) optical disks, CD-ROMS, DVD-ROMS, flash drives, external hard drives, physical storage, security, protective and related ADP supplies, and toner cartridges. Toner cartridge offerors must provide arrangements for empty toner cartridges to be returned from customers. This may include prepaid shipping labels in the products packaging and/or rebates.

For any inquiries or questions regarding Saitech Inc.’s GSA OS4 contract please contact via email: erwin@esaitech.com