Is Your Data Protected from a Virus/Ransomeware Attack?

Talking about data backup to decision makers is a great lesson in human psychology.  Many companies just don’t take it serious enough.  As long as everything is working, business owners don’t really think about it.  It’s one of those things where many people don’t think the worst will happen to them, until it does.

In the old days, backup and recovery plans were often sold using a fear based sales pitch, with references to catastrophic disasters and a nuclear meltdown.  I think that many business owners just couldn’t wrap their head around spending thousands or even millions of dollars trying to figure out how to protect themselves from Armageddon, and understandably so.  The other pitch many business owners hear is to protect themselves from hardware failure or software corruption.  This is a legitimate argument and should absolutely not be overlooked, but the reality also is that modern hardware and software is far more stable than ever before.  With the use of modern day virtualization software, a good monitoring system, and a good team many of the issues with hardware and software failures can be prevented before they happen.

Today’s data is more vulnerable than ever before from attack by malicious software programs called Ransomware.  These programs enter a company’s network via email or download and encrypts all the data on your local machine and network, and unfortunately these programs are here to stay.  Once the data is encrypted, it cannot be accessed without a key. The keys are released to the owner of the data after paying a fee, typically via Bitcoin because it’s untraceable, hence the name Ransomware. If a sound backup plan is in place, there is no need to pay the fee. A company could eliminate the virus and restore the files that were compromised from backup.  If you aren’t sure about the status and health of your backups, we recommend having an expert do an audit of your current systems and provide recommendations.  JNT TEK offers free assessments of IT & security systems for any company.

Best Practices for Business Owners or Decision Makers:

1. Verify that the backups are scheduled at an interval you’re comfortable with
2. Ensure your backups are going offsite
3. Confirm someone is receiving daily alerts if the backups were successful or failed
   1. You don’t want to assume your backups were working as scheduled, but then find out later when you need them that they weren’t
4. Review on a periodic basis the files and folder being backed up to make sure everything is covered
5. Restore data occasionally – even if it’s one file to make sure that it works

Written By:
JNT TEK
818-456-0626

www.jnttek.com
sales@jnttek.com