It’s Disaster Preparedness Month, do you know where your business is vulnerable? A natural disaster, server crash, cyber attack, or another data-erasing disaster could cost you thousands in lost profit, weeks of downtime, or worse, complete collapse. Being prepared to respond quickly to disasters can help you save your business so it is critical to understand where your business is vulnerable (and how you can reduce their risks).
Your Data: Making sure that your data is protected is a constant battle you don’t want to lose. Companies that get hacked or otherwise exposed of sensitive client, employee, and organizational data face severe penalties, lawsuits, and reputational and profit damage. Crashed servers can result in weeks of lost productivity, unexpected recovery costs, and ultimately lost profits. Bad actors get increasingly sophisticated in their attacks so your cybersecurity stack needs to be routinely reviewed and updated. Server crashes can be avoided by transitioning to cloud storage solutions that offer highly secure, high-availability data centers with failover and redundancy built in.
Your Employees: It’s not always a malicious or disgruntled employee that leaves you vulnerable. An unaware or overwhelmed employee is the number one target of bad actors. One careless click on a nefarious (sometimes innocent-looking) link and a cybercriminal could have access to your entire business. They can laterally spread across your devices and into your network to create havoc with ransomware, malware, data extraction, and threats of extortion. Requiring annual security awareness training will help educate your employees on current cyber-attack methods and how to avoid exposing your business to attacks.
Outdated Use Policies: Likely your employees are using more cloud-based solutions and a mixture of corporate and personally owned devices in the office or while working remotely. The increased internet access and device entry points into your network are vulnerabilities. It is important for the security and productivity of your business that you have updated use policies that set expectations like requiring multi-factor authentication, security awareness training, and establishing personal-use restrictions.
Lack of or Untested Disaster Recovery Plan: It is critical that you have a documented, updated, and tested plan to recover from a natural disaster, server crash, cyber attack, or other data-erasing catastrophes. What backup, security, and business continuity systems are in place? Is all of your critical data being backed up every day? Is there a primary AND alternate administrator who has the elevated access and experience to protect and restore your IT network? Has your plan been tested and you are confident everyone understands and can perform their role in recovery?
A Managed Services Provider (MSP) helps you manage your IT network day to day and can help you secure and protect your network from emerging risks. During September, Pearl Solutions Group is offering a FREE Disaster Recovery Business Assessment (a $300 value!)! If we don’t find issues, you’ll have peace of mind that your network is secure and you could recover quickly in the event of a disaster. If we DO find gaps, you’ll be able to fix them BEFORE you experience an unexpected catastrophe. Click here to get started on your free assessment.
