Senior system engineer Mohamed Ali has earned a nickname that might sound a little intimidating at first – but for UBX Cloud clients, it’s actually a badge of confidence.

“People call me a butcher,” he says.

But he’s not butchering choice cuts of meat or anything along those lines. What Mohamed butchers is problems. They are helpless when he shows up.

“I love problems, which is to say I love to solve problems,” Mohamed explains. “So anything that challenges me, I want to spend my time figuring out and understanding what is happening. Fixing the problem makes me happy. They usually call me the butcher, which comes from fixing impossible things.”

With a deep passion for troubleshooting and a drive to “fix the impossible,” Mohamed thrives on challenges that push him to understand and solve even the most technical issues. His work ensures UBX Cloud clients stay operational, online, and protected from costly downtime. In industries like healthcare, that reliability can mean far more than saving time or money. It can mean saving lives.

Since joining UBX Cloud in 2015, Mohamed has become a key part of the infrastructure team, managing server architecture and serving as a backup administrator. He’s known for staying calm under pressure and delivering quick, effective resolutions when it matters most.

According to Steven Panovski, CEO of UBX Cloud, Mohamed is the strongest link in the UBX chain.

“When we first worked together,10 years ago, I was blown away,” Steven says. “Here is this young man in his early 20s and he is the best damn engineer I’ve ever seen. He is omniscient and has awareness into everything technical and otherwise. When others cannot, Mohamed can!”

His time with UBX has seen him move from contractor to employee to manager to part owner in less than 10 years. In addition to great results for clients, Mohamed has also delivered the welcome benefit of sound sleep for his boss.

“We are the guardians of cloud, and we work in the dark, without anyone seeing what we actually do and how profound our involvement really is,” Steven says. “When my shift would end and I handed the baton to him, I would rest peacefully knowing that nothing would go wrong. Our team has called him ‘The Butcher of India’ and ‘The Chuck Norris of Cloud’ – and rightfully so!”

Before joining UBX Cloud, Mohamed built a global career as an infrastructure engineer for India’s Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, along with additional experience as a support engineer for a managed service provider in Canada, and as a system engineer for a company based in Chennai, India.

He is based in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India, and has a Bachelor of Computer Science from Madurai Kamaraj University.

Companies who opt for cloud data storage may sometimes be under the impression that cybersecurity is now less of a concern for them – since no matter what happens they can always retrieve their data from the cloud.

There is some truth embedded in that idea, but it misses many critical facts about the nature of cybersecurity threats today. Denying you access to your data is one of the ways cyberattackers can hurt you. But once hackers can get their hands on your contracts, HR agreements, financial information and so many other things, they can sell it off, or extort you to pay them not to.

Imagine the harm a hacker could do to a law firm that has 200 clients – all of whose files got exposed to the hacker. Consider what you would do if you were the firm’s managing partner, and you received a threat from the hacker to contact all those clients and make demands.

Or, the hacker will tell you, you could make an extortion payment to stop it all from happening. You’re probably going to make that payment. But how did you end up in that situation in the first place?

Cloud-based data needs protection every bit as sophisticated as the data on the server in your office – and far too many companies find out too late that their cloud storage provider doesn’t really offer sophisticated data management services with strong cybersecurity measures built in.

UBX Cloud protects clients’ cloud-based data with CrowdStrike and Veeam, a cybersecurity tool that combines network layer, infrastructure, end-user and AI-based functions into a single interface.

This is critical because far too many users don’t realize how vulnerable cloud-based data can be. Even people with IT backgrounds can make mistakes when implementing cloud configurations (as they can with internal servers as well).

Mistakes like an employee clicking on a phishing e-mail, or giving away log-in credentials to someone who is up to no good can be particularly dangerous with cloud applications, as many cyberhackers only require log-in credentials to access the entire system.

If hackers can gain access to a company’s cloud-based data by absconding with someone’s log-in credentials, the consequences for the company can be devastating.

Several issues can expose your cloud-based data to risks, including:

Exposed APIs. This well-known acronym for Application Programming Interfaces refers to the systems that allow different digital platforms to communicate and exchange data with one another. But APIs can be exposed to hackers, and when they’re hit, they can give hackers access to all the programs and users who are working through them.

Let’s say I sell t-shirts, and your company has published the prices of materials I would need to make the shirts. Using APIs, my site can query your site to get that information. Every time that happens, you get charged for the API query. You know that, and you figure the likely volume of activity is one you can handle.

But hackers can manipulate queries like that, to the point where they are able to take over your entire system. Suddenly you jump from 1,000 API requests in a month to 400,000, and finance wants to know why the bill is so much higher. By the time IT realizes what’s going on, you’re deep into these charges. That’s the wrong way to find out your system is figuratively on fire.

**Overprivileged users. **Granting too many people high-level access creates unnecessary risk. Most employees only need limited permissions, and administrative rights should be tightly controlled. Convenience should never outweigh security – because it only takes one misuse to compromise critical data.

Cloud systems are particularly vulnerable to what’s called zero-day attacks, in which hackers take advantage of patching issues before the user realizes the patch is necessary. Open-source software is especially at risk for such attacks, as many of the companies who use such software don’t have the IT bandwidth to patch as often as they should.

In theory, cloud storage shields you from system attacks. In reality, it only works if you have the right protections in place. That’s why businesses choose UBX Cloud – we’ve already built the tools, expertise and strategies to keep your data safe.

Security isn’t automatic. You need UBX Cloud to be confident your data is safe.

The health care industry is where you go to heal if you get physically injured or attacked. But what happens when the health care industry is injured or attacked – not physically but digitally?

The answer is that hundreds of millions of people’s medical records can be exposed. In fact, there’s no “can be” about it. It’s already happening.

Minnesota-based Change Healthcare was hacked in 2024, with an astonishing 192 million patients having their health records compromised by a hacking incident.

You read that right: One hundred ninety-two million patient records.

That was the largest breach of patient records in history, by far, although it was certainly not the only significant one in recent years. The Kaiser Foundation Health Plan saw 13.4 million patient records exposed in 2024, while Colorado-based Welltok Inc. experienced a breach in 2023 that put 14.7 million patient records in the hands of hackers.

There have been more than 100 breaches in the past several years affecting 1 million or more patients each. And these were attacks against well-established companies who had full-time IT departments and strict HIPAA-compliance policies and procedures.

Cyber attackers know where they can inflict the most pain, and recent reports say they are focusing more than ever on the health care sector. The organization Health-ISAC recently reported that in the third quarter of 2025 the industry saw an uptick in threats associated with broader events and growing risks.

One of those includes the notorious Shai-Halud worm, which is distributed through malicious NPM packages and embeds itself in other packages owned by the target. From there it exfiltrates data to public GitHub repositories.

Another common attack on the health care industry has involved phishing attacks using QR codes that hide malicious links within images – thus bypassing much of the security that would otherwise stop them.

When patient records are compromised, it’s a nightmare both for the patients and for the providers.

UBX Cloud clients are protected by a cybersecurity platform that is based on UTM Stack, which combines network layer, infrastructure, end-user, and AI-based protection. It combines alerting and mitigation into a single interface that makes everything completely visible.

There is much any organization can do to protect itself – from regular patching to network segmentation to employee education on phishing attacks. But you also need a system that can sniff out threats, and can recognize the most serious kinds and take action immediately.

The health care industry has invested heavily in information technology and in solid professionals to manage it. But not every IT professional is a cybersecurity expert. Many are top-notch at designing networks that can operate efficiently and store data effectively, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are up to speed on the cyberthreats that evolve and emerge on a daily basis.

It’s critical for top executives within health care organizations to understand the difference, and to make sure they have the people, the tools, the strategies and the discipline to stay ahead of cyberthreats. Hundreds of millions of patients’ data should provide more than enough incentive.

But the threats are only becoming more lethal and deceptive. As the health care industry relies increasingly on its digital systems to operate, attackers have the ability to shut down entire enterprises. Both the financial and human cost of that are too horrible to contemplate.

Get on top of this now. We’re here to help.