Until a few months ago, 9% of our backup customers have been performing a restore every month. That’s quite a lot of customers – roughly 1,530 – who’ve needed to restore data from their backup sets over a 30-day cycle.
In the past two months this figure has increased to 12% of customers restoring their data, that’s a total of 2040 restores a month.
We think this hike is due to load-shedding kicking in again, plus the high incidence of ransomware making its way into business systems via email, phishing and unwisely opened attachments.
Cyber criminals are having a field day, especially with small to medium-size businesses, which tend to be the last to implement comprehensive cyber security strategies.
Backup and cyber security go hand in hand
It seems that backup is often overlooked as part of a cyber security strategy, in favour of installing antivirus and anti-malware. However, being able to access a copy of your data when you’ve been hit by a cyber attack is vital for ensuring your business carries on.
It’s true to say that by including data backup in your cyber security safety net, you’re securing your most valuable resource.
South Africans are experiencing frustrations like never before. Some 17,000 businesses have put their faith in IronTree to backup their vital data, but these days you need more than data backup to protect against data theft, corruption and cyber crime.
Cyber security isn’t a complicated task
There are straightforward steps you can take to protect your business on a day to day basis, and comprehensive online solutions that give you extra security.Automate your backup system.
- Automation means you’ll never lose more work than your last successful backup so it’s a failsafe way of ensuring your business data is safe in a remote environment. Better still, simulating a restoration of your backup a few times a year allows you to be confident your data will all still be there if you’re hit by a cyber attack.
- Raise your employees’ awareness in cyber principles. People are the weakest link in a security chain and an educated staff cuts the chance of a cyber attack by an astonishing 90 percent. Training can be as simple as registering each employee for an online course and following up with weekly discussions. Check out this cyber security educational course.
- Implement or revise existing processes that protect your business’s systems. This will include a firewall to protect your network, software to detect viruses and all kinds of malware, a scanning system to monitor the devices that your employees use (desktop computers, laptops, printers, mobile phones and tablets) and a patch management process to ensure patches are installed as soon as they’re available. Your systems and your software also need to be upgraded across all devices as soon as upgrades are issued.
- Put a recovery plan in place to keep your business operations running while the disruption is sorted out. Typically, a disaster recovery plan will kick in to give you a near-zero recovery time. This way your business will be covered no matter what kind of attack hits you.
IronTree protects more than 17,000 businesses and is South Africa’s largest data protection and backup business, with a support centre that holds your hand when you experience a cyber security attack.
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