You wake to a frantic call from your operations manager, your ordering system is offline, and customers are tweeting. You do a mental checklist: firewalls? Patched. MFA? Mostly. Backups? They should be fine… right? You try to sound calm, but the doubts keep you wide-awake.
“You” don’t exist. Your organisation doesn’t have a dedicated security or IT team, and your service provider is focused on resetting passwords and keeping the lights on. Your business has grown in complexity over the last 10 years, the regulatory environment has tightened, and now you’ve been breached. What’s next?
alltasksIT now does as much security work as traditional IT service providers – we keep you secure as much as we reset passwords and fix printers. The lines between a traditional IT partner and a focused security partner are blurred. We are increasingly ditching the confusing acronyms in favor of being actual partners in your business and just telling you what needs to be done in plain English.
The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) knows this story. Their new “Foundations for Modern Defensible Architecture” is designed to prevent 2 a.m. moments by baking security into every layer of your business. The PDF is excellent, especially if cyber isn’t your day job. That’s where we come in.
alltasksIT acknowledges the large gap between in knowledge between our customers in manufacturing, and what the government thinks everything should be doing. So before we go on, just know that you’ve landed here because you’re interested in the concepts behind this blog, or because you’re looking to take something to your boss that you know you have a problem and you’re now sure how you’re going to solve with – with alltasksIT’s support.
Assume breach, limit damage. The most true adage in 2025 for IT Security is that assume you will get breached, and build your plans and defences around that.
Verify everything, log everything. Technology complexity has grown. Service providers never logged everything by default, they continue not to becuase it was expensive to do so. Not anymore. Pick a service provider that logs every single activity of data and events across all your technology.
Aim for constant improvement, not perfection. Even if you had an unlimited budget, there are only 24 hours in a day. It will take a company like alltasksIT, traditionally, 20 hours a month for a customer of > 10 staff to patch and keep things secure and the moment we are finished on one security matter, another one crops up. You want your technology and security partner to sit with you on the journey towards securing your business because the work is never done.
The ten ACSC “Foundations” simply turn those three ideas into a checklist for identity, devices, networks, data and apps.
Correct, and you’ve probably heard about the Essential8 because blogged about it no less than 10 times. We even built a self assessment tool you can carry out on yourself to see where you stand. It’s the yard stick for security for Australian business. It’s the basis for simplifying complex IT security matters for businesses of all sizes.
The Essential Eight is still the practical yardstick the insurers, regulators and auditors use today. Think of Modern Defensible Architecture as the architectural drawing; the Essential Eight is the tape-measure you hold against each wall to prove you built it straight.
Our industry loves a good framework, our customers don’t.
You might start hearing of a framework called SMB1001 – a baseline that distils the Essential Eight into four starter blocks: know assets, harden logins, back up, monitor. Tick SMB1001 and you’re most of the way to Essential Eight maturity 1, and on the flight-path to ISO 27001 if bigger tenders demand it.
Confused yet?
There’s dozens of security frameworks but you just need an answer to the question “am i secure?”. That’s where alltasksIT is going to help you starting today.
Why many businesses still feel lost
We still meet CEOs who believe cyber-security equals “buy antivirus, hope for the best”. Frameworks multiply, premiums climb, penalties grow, and suddenly the board starts hearing about zero trust pillars and secure-by-design. Information overload sets in, genuine progress stalls, and everyone goes back to running the core business.
alltasksIT is built to translate three-letter acronyms into everyday protection – without enterprise-level bills. We own the tooling, the process and the follow-through; you keep the focus on customers. As a business owner you don’t need to understand the tech, you need to understand your exposure to risk and that someone is taking care of you. Our proven process below is the start of the journey of securing your business with us, today.
|
Stage |
What we do |
What you feel |
|---|---|---|
|
Audit |
Benchmarks you against Essential Eight & SMB1001. |
Clarity – a single-page risk score you can show the board. |
|
Roadmap |
Tasks ordered by business impact & cash-flow; no vendor fluff. |
Control – see exactly what happens, when and why. |
|
Action |
We run patching, MFA hygiene, backup tests, log-review and incident playbooks inside your existing licences. |
Confidence – the basics stay fixed without hiring head-count. |
|
Quarterly Assurance |
Retesting, evidence packs, insurer & regulator artefacts. |
Sleep – proof you remain compliant and claim-ready. |
Most of this sits inside our standard managed-services package, so you’re not paying twice for the same protection but we do have packages of all sizes for all customers to ensure we need a price and protection point that meets your business size and risk appetite.
Sleep easier at night – you know someone is watching the dashboards after you switch off the lights.
Stay insurable – Essential Eight evidence reduces premium blow-outs and excess clauses.
Tick the legal box – frameworks grow, but the fundamentals repeat; we keep you aligned as they evolve
Modern Defensible Architecture, and security more broadly, sounds expensive until you realise:
You already own most of the tools that can get you secure. You own Azure AD, Microsoft 365 and most cloud platforms already include many controls – they’re just untuned.
Insurance excess from a single breach often dwarfs the annual cost of hardening.
The biggest line-item is people’s time; outsourcing that time to a specialist team is usually cheaper than DIY.
Skim the Foundations PDF for ten minutes – just the headings.
Email us “Am I defensible?” – we’ll line up a pulse audit slot.
Decide whether you want a co-managed model (we coach your IT staff) or fully-managed (we own the keyboard).
We’ll bring the coffee, the roadmap and the reassurance.
The government has raised the cyber bar again, but it doesn’t have to keep you awake. With alltasksIT at your side, Modern Defensible Architecture becomes an achievable, affordable routine – not an endless buzzword parade. Ready to swap anxiety for action? Let’s talk.
Chief Customer Officer
Mark Boyd is a Chief Customer Officer (CCO), plays a key executive role responsible for overseeing the entire customer experience within alltasksIT. The CCO serves as the voice of the customer at the highest levels of the company, ensuring that customer-centric strategies are developed and implemented across all departments.
