2024 was a year marked by rapid technological advancements, changing cybersecurity threats and business efficiency improvements. At CTRL-S, we have had a busy year navigating these challenges while delivering innovative, bespoke solutions to our clients.
In this year end review, we’ll delve into the key challenges, solutions and growth we experienced, with the aim to share our experience to empower your business to thrive in the ever changing IT landscape ready for 2025.
Challenges faced in 2024
2024 brought many challenges, from new technologies to new types of cyber attacks. At CTRL-S, we take these challenges in our stride and build dynamic solutions that mitigate these challenges for both ourselves and our clients.
The first challenge we faced was the rise in popularity of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, such as Chat GPT. This new technology has many advantages to businesses, such as the ability to provide answers to complex questions in a human-readable format, allowing new knowledge to be obtained faster. However, these technologies bring many challenges to an organisation in terms of privacy and accuracy. Currently, most generative AI technologies use inputted data to train the model. This means that any sensitive company data entered is accessible by other parties and provides the platform with data to learn from your company’s intellectual property.
Generative AI technology can also provide misinformation or be biased. This is because it can only access the data that is available to it, and the verification methods are not always accurate.
A challenge that our business analysis team have faced this year is the migration from using both VLOOKUPs and HLOOKUPs to just using XLOOKUP within Microsoft Excel. These allow for searches to be made within a table or range. An XLOOKUP is a more flexible and powerful version of a VLOOKUP, allowing data analysis to be further enhanced and detailed.
The team have found this has enabled them to look up data both vertically and horizontally in one function, using a selected column or row to return a value. In addition, the newly added function argument If_not_found allows a value to be set, stopping #N/As from being generated where data isn’t found. This keeps data cleaner and easier to analyse, making their daily operations smoother.
The third challenge faced by the team this year has been the ever evolving cyber threat landscape. Every year, the threat landscape for cyber attacks changes due to changing working patterns, new technologies, world events, and political status.
This year, we have seen a rise in the popularity of AI-enhanced social engineering attacks. This includes a method of vishing with spoofed voices, known as deepfakes, designed to replicate familiar voices such as celebrities, colleagues or friends. We have also seen in traditional attacks, such as Phishing, AI technology being used to make bespoke templates targeted at individuals or organisations.
These changes have shifted the landscape significantly and require updated training to be provided regularly to our team and our clients. We have done this by continuously updating our Cyber Wise service to include training on both the fundamentals and the latest big issues in the cybersecurity world.
IT Solutions and Innovations
Along with a variety of challenges, 2024 brought many solutions and innovations to the table.
The first of these that we saw a significant positive change with are the new features of the Microsoft 365 suite. A fundamental driving change within this is the new features of Copilot for business. Copilot is a generative AI system from Microsoft that is designed to integrate flawlessly with the suite.
It can do many things for your business, including making notes in Teams meetings and creating documentation from this. Another feature that we found brought big change is the Microsoft Agenda service, which is designed to help with meetings and documentation. These improvements allowed our team to be more efficient in their meetings, allowing the focus to be on the topics at hand, not documentation.
A further innovation for our team was the introduction of Managed Extended Detection and Response technology. This technology collects and manages cyber threat data across an organisation’s infrastructure and reports suspicious activities. This has allowed us to identify suspicious behaviours and potential threats for our clients significantly faster than previously possible and through solid processes and systems, mitigate several threats before they resulted in a disaster. MXDR allows us to provide a more proactive service in identifying and responding to cyber threats.
Another solution we identified was using automation technologies to free up internal resources to focus on strategic efforts. An example of where we did this was configuring email journeys to be more customised and effective within our service desk. This means requests that require a response are automatically chased based on a set of criteria specified within the request itself. This eliminates a significant portion of the team’s time previously spent monitoring and reviewing stagnant requests, allowing efforts to be focused on providing faster response times to new requests.
Internally we innovated this year by setting up a new benefits package, providing a clear pathway and rewards scheme for team members. This has been set up to give back to our hardworking team, creating a happier and healthier workforce.
Lessons Learned
It is important to take the time to reflect and look back at the things that have not gone as intended and implement controls to move past any mistakes, allowing you to continue to thrive. At CTRL-S, we believe it is important to recognise mistakes and spend time understanding why they happened to learn and grow from whatever the mistake was. These lessons provide invaluable insight into a business and, through effectively applying them, allow the business to grow and thrive.
This year, we have further learnt the need for standardisation in certain critical areas, such as cybersecurity. We believe it is important that all our clients and internally the same standards of cybersecurity are upheld to best protect their business. To ensure this, we implemented our Cyber Protect packages, providing market leading cybersecurity protection for incredible value.
In conclusion, 2024 has been a year of change and innovation for CTRL-S; we have seen new technologies such as Microsoft Copilot and XLOOKUP in Microsoft Excel, revolutionise workflows, implemented a new benefits system to improve team happiness and learnt from our mistakes and provided set baseline of security to ensure consistency across all clients.
Get in touch today to see how we can help revolutionise your 2025!
