Backups, Security and Virus Protection
This is a boring subject, a bit like insurance, it only gets exciting when something serious goes wrong.
And then it can put you out of business.
Many businesses have been hit by ransomware or infected with viruses that are just malicious.
There are many ways to protect your data, but are you really safe? Although it happened 10 years ago, the case of DistributeIT is a classic and provides a sobering illustration of what can happen.
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/4800-aussie-sites-evaporate-after-hack-20110621-1gd1h.html
At DistributeIT the websites of 4800 Australian businesses evaporated and were unable to be recovered after a malicious attack. The problem was that the backups were all on servers accessible by the hacker. There was no physically separated offline backup that could be used to recover the data.
In the old days backup drives and tapes were used and these could be stored in different locations, sometimes in banks, to protect valuable data from being lost for whatever reason. In a worst case scenario, a new computer could be setup and the data restored onto it. Now many businesses just use the cloud to backup their data.
There is a belief that data “in the cloud” is safe. When you use the cloud, your data is as safe as the people or procedures that safeguard your data. In many cases, backups are kept for 7 days so that you can restore in the case of a disaster. What if your data was hacked last month, a large quantity deleted and you have just discovered the problem? That’s it – Data gone.
How would it affect you if something were to happen to all that data in the cloud? Would you know who owed you money and how much? Could you deliver to your customers? Would your business survive a major cashflow shock?
Apart from cloud technology, both data storage and network speeds have improved enormously. Terabyte drives are inexpensive and the NBN allows us to move huge quantities of data. It has become a simple process to copy your data to a local drive which can be physically disconnected, but not many people do it.
By law you have to keep a lot of data for 7 years. There are Directors’ legal responsibilities, but what if the backups that were sitting in the cloud and have been identified as old data have been deleted. Gone.
And then there is the case of the diligent office administrator who changed the drive every day and took the latest one home. When the system crashed, it was discovered that the system was backing up the wrong data. Gone.
And yet it is so simple to copy your data onto a rotating set of external drives, physically disconnect them and test them regularly to make sure it is backing up the correct data, by testing the restore at regular intervals.
Whether it is a malicious cyber-attack or a major computer failure, whether it be from a hard disk failure, fire, theft or a major power outage or spike, it is not difficult to provide for the worst case scenario.
