Systemic Digital Inc

Most businesses find out they have a gap when they're already in it.

The Alberta government just committed $40M to cybersecurity upgrades. After a surge in incidents. Not before.

If a provincial government — with dedicated IT staff and full infrastructure budgets — ended up reacting to breaches instead of preventing them, the question worth sitting with is where your business stands right now.

Legacy software. Unpatched systems. No MFA. Those three things show up in nearly every successful breach happening in Calgary right now.

None of them are complicated to fix. They just require someone paying attention.

That's the job. 👉 systemicdigital.com

If your IT bill goes up every time you hire someone, that's not IT strategy — that's IT sprawl with a monthly invoice.

The per-device, per-user billing model was designed for a different era of managed services. Add a device, add a cost. Simple. Predictable. Also structurally misaligned with what you're actually trying to accomplish, which is a business that runs reliably and doesn't get breached.

Outcome-based IT asks different questions. Is the business more secure than it was last quarter? Is downtime decreasing? Is the cost of IT incidents trending in the right direction? These are the metrics that tell you whether your IT investment is working.

The billing model your IT provider uses is worth understanding, because it shapes what they're actually incentivized to optimize.

Most businesses are paying for Microsoft 365 security features they haven't turned on.

The default configuration — the settings M365 ships with when you first set it up — is not optimized for security. It's optimized for getting started quickly. Those aren't the same thing, and the difference matters.

MFA not enforced. Legacy authentication protocols left open. Audit logging not enabled. External email forwarding allowed without restriction. These aren't exotic misconfigurations. They're common, they're findable in a basic security review, and they're consistently on the list of how breaches happen.

If the last time anyone reviewed your M365 security settings was "when we set it up," that's worth revisiting.