COVID-19 has forced almost all businesses to take that quantum leap into the realm of work from home. From the stomach dropping panic that ensued with news agencies around the world proclaiming doom, death and destruction to the reality that business owners needed to act swiftly to secure hardware for their employees to function in a make shift office surrounded with children’s toys and last nights dinner. Now as the dust settles and management is starting to see through a haze of rash decisions, questions are being asked.
- How do we protect our data?
- What about our Intellectual Property?
- Is this safe? For our employees? For our business?
- What about the rise of ransomware?
- How do we improve on security, without compromising productivity even more?
Securing your asset(s)
To be frank there isn’t a fool proof, Fort Knox solution that you can implement and walk away from. So lets start there. Security in an ever changing landscape is something that businesses NEED to start to realise they cannot ignore.
A study on the effects of successful ransomware attacks by well known security company MalwareBytes has shown that not only is the attacks very real and coming to a place near you, but cause 22% of SME’s to collapse. That is almost 1 in 4 businesses failing due to data corruption.
So how do we mitigate against this?
- Implement a robust backup strategy. These vary considerably depending on the processes business have in place.
- Rigorously test the strategies once put in place.
- Do NOT just set and forget. Schedule recovery attempts so that you know that things are working, not just hoping they are.
- Keep everything updated.
- Educate end users. These are typically the ones responsible for the infections, so alerting them to things to be on the look out for is going to be a big step in the right direction.
- Stay vigilant. Never worrying about it before isn’t going to cut it in today’s age.
Improve your performance by transforming
Cloud services like Microsoft 365 Apps (Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, etc) are brilliant pieces of technology aimed at not only increasing productivity, but also to increase security. With a mobile workforce this software giant has expanded significantly into the market of work from home and is getting very good at it.
I want to point out that the fallacy where cloud is safe and secure just because it is cloud is a heinous lie. When you hear cloud, think someone else’s computer. Sure it is probably more secure and locked down then mine or yours, but in the end the reality is no one should care more about your data then you.
So even with cloud solutions it is important to back them up as well.
Where do we go from here?
Through out this global pandemic, TechCare has been migrating many clients from legacy services to full cloud solutions using solely Microsoft 365 systems.
Not only does Microsoft make the jump compelling from an economics point of view, but also from the sheer volume of included software packages available all under the one license.
- Communication = Email, Contacts, Calender, Tasks = 50 GB of online storage
- Storage = OneDrive and SharePoint = 1TB per user, plus 1TB per SharePoint Team Site
- Collaboration = Teams (think Skype on steroids), Online document editing
- User management and control
To keep things secure in the cloud we have partnered with Probax to ensure that our clients data is protected from ransomware attacks. Up to 6 snapshots per day are stored indefinitely so that at any time we can “rewind the clock” and bring those documents, contacts, emails back from the proverbial grave and into the right hands once again.
Each business is different. Which means strategies aren’t a one size fits all. Give us a call or send us an email so that we can work with you to protect your assets, your data and your livelihood.
