In the past week there have been 8 burglaries reported to the Victoria police department in which a theft occurred from a spa or a salon. The stolen items included tablets, laptops and other technology.
If you lost your computer, how long would it take you to get back up and running? A day, a week, a month? Sure, there's insurance to get your computer replaced - but what about the data. Do you have a backup, does the backup run every night? What about the appointments you've booked during the day?
The ability to have resilience in your business is key. One of those ways is to ensure your data is backed up - and backed up often! Imagine your total staff count and multiply that by 8 hours. What if you lost that number of hours of productivity all at once? What if you multiplied that by 5 days? or more! That's what a well designed backup infrastructure will help prevent.
What do you keep on your computer? Most small business have one or two computers. You may have everything from client records, booking schedules, payment info and other sensitive business data. Do you have a spreadsheet of client credit cards being stored so you can easily charge your clients? What do you have in your downloads folder? Do you have banking statements, credit card info? We've even seen medical records being downloaded on work computers and still residing in download folders. Having your computer encrypted is a key part of preventing data loss. What if your ability to be back up and running was measured in hours instead of days or weeks?
These are just some of the questions we ask every client and areas we work to ensure is covered with secure infrastructure.
We are happy to provide you these 8 tips to help protect your computers and data:
- Run backups at least daily, if not hourly
- Encrypt your computer
- Have a modern, next generation antivirus/anti-malware tool on your computer
- Ensure you are using 2 factor authentication on any cloud service
- Don't use the same password for every account (use a password manager!)
- Don't let clients use the same wifi network as your business computers
- Know the source of your email before you open it
- Business computers for business use, home computers for home use.
Victoria police is encouraging all local businesses to secure or remove items of value. They have several open files: 22-901108, 22-38738, 22-901084, 22-38290, 22-36978, 22-37041, 22-36871, 22-33150. For more information on their tips and search for information, visit their blog here.
Ian Robertson
