There are lots of cyber threats out there. With this thought in mind, is the following statement TRUE or FALSE? “The best way to protect information is by isolating it in one place: your computer."
You may see where this is going, but this statement of course is false. One consistent and unwavering recommendation we’ve been making to clients for years is: “Never save anything on your computer because in a business environment, regular computers are generally NOT backed up.” Servers get backed up, infrastructure gets backed up; but unless specifically requested, regular computers are not backed up.
To illustrate, this article discusses what happened to all of the computers at a university when the IT department decided to do some computer cleanup without telling anyone beforehand (only a few months ago). As a side note, we would never do this to any of our clients, period.
Essentially, the cleanup led to students, faculty and staff across the university losing valuable data that was saved on their desktop computers (i.e. local drives). Some information was permanently lost. This is a stark lesson: Everyone needs to be careful about where, and how, their data is saved.
It’s always a risk to save information on a computer that is not backed up. Referring to the article, all you have to do is replace “bad IT department” with virus, ransomware, or simple equipment failure; and the result would be the same.
One last thing…backups are not a new concept; but in our experience, most businesses are not backed up properly. That is, in a way that they could recover quickly. Yes, they may be able to recover all of their information; but how long will it take? Minutes? Hours? Days? Longer? Ask yourself “How long could our business function if it took days to get IT systems working normally again?”
If you are not a client of ours and have concerns about your current set up, please feel free to contact us: (289) 895-8948 or info@birmingham.ca
