This week as part of Leeds Business Week we had 20 people booked on a free seminar we delivered at The Pit in Leeds City Centre.

It was a good bunch of people in attendance and after the seminar we had a really good chat about Cyber Security and there were some amazing questions about the future of cyber security and the best practices for protecting their businesses.

The reason we worked with Leeds Business Week to deliver this seminar was to increase awareness of where we find ourselves in the fight against hackers, viruses, malware and ransomware.

The truth is we are losing the fight and the hackers from countries such as China and Russia are out in front and we are trying to play catch up. Traditional methods of protecting users are out the window, with modern techniques concentrating on remedy and pretty weak firewalls, plus it doesn’t help when the NSA practically gift their Ransomware tools to the general public.

Security applications now seem to be moving towards anticipating user behaviour in an effort to combat infections and security breaches. But with all of this and the most sophisticated software in the world the best strategy is to make sure that should you suffer a data breach it’s as small as possible and you can get back on your feet as soon as possible.

This follows two paths in a nutshell.

1. Backup
2. Device Protection

In terms of backup we suggest a method that achieves the following

– Previous versions

If your data is somehow corrupted by an infection or anything else for that matter it’s important to have a backup that keeps previous versions, this is probably the most important part of keeping successful backups.

– Email reports

It’s one thing putting a backup in place and it’s another keeping an eye on it to make sure it’s running properly. We’ve seen many a failed backup when it’s time to use the data and therefore the client has nothing. Email reports keep you in the loop and alert you to backup failures.

– Offsite copies

If something should happen to your offices then it’s important to have a copy of your data offsite to restore, burst pipes, fire and theft happen to a business on average every 7 minutes. And Ransomware attacks are successful every 40 seconds.

Now we come to device protection, and you might not like this, as we mentioned before the hackers are currently winning and the software and hardware protection available is somewhat lagging behind. But if you are using free antivirus software you’re leaving yourself open to attack, literally.

These products are free for a reason and while part of that reason is to sell you their more expensive product that actually offers a small amount of protection they are far far behind the leaders, you need to protect your offices with a robust Endpoint UTM solution. Don’t worry about what that means, just give us a call