Think of the things in your business you really cannot afford to lose. You may picture your office flooding and ruining your tools, your work vehicles breaking down, or your employees walking out. All reasonable fears, all ones that you can mitigate – if you have time to prepare. But there’s one source of major anxiety just waiting to spring, and many businesses are not ready for it: your tech blowing up on you!
Modern Day
The modern work environment is almost always at least a little hybridized between ‘the old ways’ and the new, and many new businesses launch entirely digitally. An artist may be able to create a drawing, get prints commissioned, and then have those prints shipped directly to customers, all without leaving their desktop computer. Accounting is another industry that’s been completely reinvented by technology, with digital ledgers and long-term automatic graphings of a business’s revenue built into almost every accounting software marketed to small businesses.
You almost certainly have to field emails now, even if your industry was once call-only. On top of that, you probably deal with business license filings online, because they really are so much more convenient and secure – sending a letter in the mail with a money order without doing certified mail is practically begging that money to go missing, so for the low low price of a 5% service fee, getting the instant feedback that your money has gone through with a printable receipt is certainly worth the price. And, at that point, surely it’s easier just to save the receipt to your computer rather than print it just to file it, right?
In this way, every business is getting sucked into digitizing, and the difference between the businesses who have catastrophic failures and the ones that don’t is usually diligence. Are you prepared? Do you know what you need to do to protect your data and devices?
And Your Documents
Your documents are valuable to someone, and that makes them a target. Inherently valuable information, like sensitive employee and client data, can be sold once stolen, but this is not the only risk on your work devices: that someone who finds them valuable might just be you! In fact, in cases of ransomware, this is more likely. Data that can’t be sold, but is critically important to you, are what ransomware targets. Things like pictures of your team or your first carbon copy receipt might not sell for any money, but they aren’t worthless – rather, knowing that you have things that you value on your computer means that scammers and hackers are not really trying to steal this data, just keep it away from you to try and extort you for money. This is, of course, still a huge problem, even if that data doesn’t end up on the dark web.
This is how the ransomware trend started: it was tough to sort through what might be valuable and what definitely wasn’t, so malware aiming to quietly steal information was taking a lot of leg work. However, just locking up a computer can be simple if the computer is out of date on updates and the owner downloads something from an untrustworthy website, and extorting the person who owns it is as easy as threatening to delete all of their photos.
However, malware is not the only threat to your files. Regular problems that might strike seemingly at random must also be considered.
Backups, Servers, and More
While malware is a crushing problem, it’s not the only crushing problem. I mentioned flooding above – if your office has tower PCs, are they on the ground under the desk, or are they on top of the desk? Your leaky roof might damage your technology, and because this is Las Vegas, you might not realize it’s going to leak until we hit the one day of stupid-heavy rain we get every year.
Another more likely concern is dust, especially if your office is connected to a warehouse, like many in Vegas are. If the PC is not getting great airflow because the CPU fan is bogged down with dust, and it starts overheating, that’s going to degrade the computer’s ability to function over time. Computers that get overly hot can start melting low-temp solder inside, or melt the thermal paste meant to help keep parts cool inside, and they stop working as efficiently as a result. You end up in a feedback loop where the device just keeps getting worse and worse at computing!
Maintaining a server with the business’s critical files on it can mitigate some risk, but the issues with any computer are still issues there. If a server does not get adequate cooling, it starts melting down, and if it gets wet, it might short.
Solid State
Modern computers with SSD (solid state drive – meaning no moving parts inside) storage are remarkably stable, so if your office devices are on the newer side, you may be lulled into a false sense of security around backups. Specifically, you may think you don’t need one, or that you don’t need to update the one you do have more than, say, once a quarter.
That’s not right, and you’re setting yourself up for a lot of pain and frustration in the future! A good backup is kind of like a spare tire: you hope you’ll never need it, but if you do ever need it, you’re going to hope it’s already inflated and that you had a jack handy, even if it’s taking up room in the trunk of your car before then. A good backup means employees still get their payroll even if the accounting computer starts overheating and shutting down every five minutes, or if you get struck by ransomware, a good backup gives you the ability to just fully reset the computer and then get back to work. An outdated backup is better than nothing, but it’s also annoying to have to redo however many months of receipts, invoicing records, bids, plans, et cetera, so keeping it up to date will be better for everyone should something happen to your device(s).
Building a Good Backup Plan
We talk a lot about the importance of backups: what does a good one actually look like? What should you do?
Firstly, a good backup is comprehensive. Backing up a PC means basically taking a screenshot of the computer as it is at the moment. While saving the important folders to a separate USB drive regularly is better than nothing, it can also be confusing, especially if you have more than one USB or more than one computer per USB. Two separate computers will have two separate default ‘documents’ folders, and managing the labelling on those so the USB is not confused adds friction to a task that’s already so tedious that many businesses don’t do it. Again – better than nothing, better than having to shell out thousands for a hard drive repair, but not as easy as it could be!
Second, a good backup is updated regularly. I mentioned above that once a quarter is going to be pretty annoying should you ever have to use it, and some industries are even recommended to update daily because of the sheer amount of information they’ll lose should they ever go down. The actual schedule you follow will depend on your data flow: how much could you stand to lose and have to start over, assuming the worst happens and a computer crashes so hard it’s unrecoverable? Would you be able to stand redoing a week’s worth of work – or waiting on your accounts manager to re-do it? Daily might not be right for you depending on the age of the computers and where this data is being stored as a backup, but we don’t recommend going any longer than a week without updating it.
Thirdly, a good backup is secure! One of the problems of the USB backup method is that the USB can just walk off, and the vast majority of USBs don’t have any sort of geolocating, or even a solid encryption option on board. You look up ‘encrypt my USB’ and you get third party programs to put a lock on them, you don’t get a built-in option.
Secure backups can look like servers in a data center, or a backup server located in a lockable IT closet where only a few people have access to it. While a fully-fledged computer is harder to walk off with (it doesn’t exactly slip into a pocket!) someone trying to steal data or give you malware shouldn’t be able to walk up to it, plug in a USB, and then unplug and walk away without anyone noticing.
Ending Notes
If you’re looking for a vendor who can help you set up a backup system for your server and computers, get in touch with us – we’ll be able to help you plot out a backup plan that makes sense for you, and a maintenance plan for that backup that won’t break the bank.
Get in touch with us here: https://elixistechnology.com/contact/
