Business is good at indecision and it’s certainly fashionable but can you afford to be?
The biggest indecision we see is when it comes to IT systems and that is usually caused by complacency. The definition is “a feeling of smug or uncritical satisfaction with oneself or one’s achievements.” That is how data is treated.
Its never gone wrong!
If a company loses its data it will lose its ability to trade or even function. We have seen it a lot recently as the number of viral attacks and old equipment failures rise. It starts with a simple act, opening the email by mistake, forgetting to make backups, thinking your computer is reliable.
If you were to ask any business person what their concerns were on a list of one to ten, data safety would not even come anywhere near but if any of the ten listed were to happen it wouldn’t raise a major worry.
The reason for complacency is that the value of data isnt appreciated or understood, its assumed that it will always be there, its existent is relied on like breathing or heartbeats. It’s the “It wont happen to me” reason for forgetting to look after it, and for some reason business people will exercise, eat, sleep, get inoculations and take medicine to keep themselves healthy but wont bother when it comes to their business health.
So what should the priorities be?
- Value your data
- Make sure you have at least 5 copies of your data off site.
- Check that the backups work regularly
- Ensure your antivirus and spyware are good enough
- Make sure you have a really suspicious culture
- Dont be complacent
- Make sure you have the power
- Think about product life cycles and replacement
- Find someone you can trust
- Value your data
You’ll notice we havent included keeping your systems up to date, updates cause us more problems than just leaving it all alone and if it isn’t broken…. The important part is keeping your protection up to date. People are religious about “use by dates” for food but have an Anti Virus which updates weekly instead of hourly or is out of licence. See point 1 above on that.
we will be investigating the points above in-depth over the next few weeks so sign up to get regular updates.
This was written with contributions from the team at CMX, our thanks for all their contributions and time.