No – you won’t die. But many people felt totally lost without Twitter, Netflix, Airbnb, etc. during the recent denial of service attacks. It’s easy to dismiss these sites as only social media and entertainment – something you can live without for a few hours – but what about sites you really need? What happens if they fail, or lose all your data? Are you prepared?
Internet attacks are a fact of life and – make no mistake – thieves want your clients’ data as well as yours. There are things a business can do to prepare, but don’t stick you head in the sand, or worse – laugh it off as it won’t happen to me.
Protect your Cloud Data
Almost all of our new clients have no protection for their Cloud data. They incorrectly assume the Cloud vendor takes care of all that. Have you read your contract? Is data protection addressed? What if your vendor gets breached or you cannot get data access for whatever reason? Are you prepared? One of the simplest things you can do is copy your data and duplicate critical processes to another Cloud provider for emergencies. It the same story as needing onsite backup, the need doesn’t magically go away in the cloud.
Protect your Internet Data Access
Do you have at least 2 ISP’s that provide independent connections to the Internet? What productivity losses would happen if no one could get to the Internet? Imagine all your employees sitting around doing nothing when a $75 a month backup circuit would get you back online. It might be slow, but something is much better than nothing. A back circuit is cheap insurance – get it.
Protect your Local Data
Do you have encryption software on all your computers? You might respond, “I have it on my notebooks and that’s enough,” but if thieves break into your building and your computers are stolen, are you ready to notify all your clients it happened? Full Disk Encryption/FDE at least makes sure the pain of losing our hardware isn’t multiplied by 100 through breach of your and your client’s data.
Trust me, you don’t want to call your clients and tell them their data has been stolen – oh, and by the way – we have no idea who has it. How would you feel getting that call from a vendor?
Security is a constant struggle, and it’s my firm’s job to swim upstream against that current at all times. Our engineers enjoy it and strive to do their best protecting our clients. Give us a call or email, we’re glad to discuss.
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