Three Things You Should Be Monitoring on Your Network 24 Hours a Day

Plenty of IT support firms tell you they monitor hundreds of things on your LAN and can present a huge 500 page report “proving” they are doing their job.   While many things are important to monitor, there are a few we see constantly ignored by competent IT staff.  Save yourself a lot of trouble by checking these three things and make sure you are protected.

1. Data Backup / Business Continuity
   Check your backup reports every day.  Make sure they show no failures, but more importantly check the logs at least once a week to verify critical items are being backed up.   We’ve seen plenty of clients add a new volume on a SAN or a private folder for the CEO/CFO to share documents for a new project, but they forgot to add it to the backup rotation.   Someone deletes a file accidentally and it can take days to renter the data.

2. Log Monitoring
   You should be checking firewall, switch, server and several other logs for unknown or problematic activity.  It a pain to be sure, but what’s worse would be to ignore something and then find out a failure or weak point could have been prevented.  We’ve seen servers run out of drive space that were sending warnings for weeks and firewall logs showing SIP attack penetration days before clients lost a dial tone and received a phone bill for thousands of fraudulent calls.  Most importantly, if you are subject to compliance such as PCI, are you following their stated requirements?

3. Windows patching and Anti-Virus
   Do you have systematic processes in place to notify you if Windows security patches are installed?  What about your anti-virus engine?  Is the scanner database current on all connected devices?  It only takes one infected machine to cripple a network and cause data loss to happen or worse, a data breach.

There are a few more items that are critical to watch and if you’d like to know more, then contact us.