Are you still using manual backups?

Still using tapes or USB drives to backup? No plans to change it soon?

Backup technology and methodology have moved rapidly over the past couple of years – the spread of reliable, fast, broadband has enabled businesses to move from manual backups to backing up to the cloud.

However, many businesses still rely on local, manual backups to discs or tape, which still offer some degree of disaster recovery in the event of the worst happening.

Why should you backup?

At this moment, the greatest threat to your business is ransomware – where cyber criminals infiltrate your system through sophisticated hacking, clever social engineering or naivety of users to infect your systems and ‘crypto-lock’ your files – followed up with a ransom demand to unlock your data.

Your first line of recovery from such an attack is to restore a backup from a previous day – before you were infected – and accept that any work that you did in the meantime will be lost. This should be cheaper than paying thousands of pounds for a decryption key from the cybercriminals which may, or may not be forthcoming. Those crooks are quite dishonest.

It is critical therefore that if you do rely on backups that make use of tapes or USB drives that you do change your drives daily. If you don’t then it may be that your last ‘good’ backup could be overwritten by a backup that contains the malware – meaning that you may have to go back further and lose more work in the process. In extreme circumstances where a disc or tape hasn’t been changed for many days (or ever) then it may be that you cannot go to a backup at all and are left with the only option of paying the ransom – and then hoping that the criminals are honest enough to provide a working encryption key.

Backup best practice advice

  • Check that whoever is responsible for changing your backup tapes, is actually doing it – every day, without fail.
  • Ensure that the person has a deputy to do it in their absence.
  • Double check that the tapes or drives are being rotated properly – that the tape for each day is used on that day.
  • Make sure that the backups are being completed successfully and without error.
  • The next thing to do is speak to us about the new technologies that are available to you now and that allow you to have backups made without any intervention and as frequently as hourly – meaning that your recovery time is reduced significantly.

Importantly, our new offerings are able to provide you with the ability to restore a copy of your systems in the cloud, that you can connect to in the event that your local systems are lost due to events such as fire, flood or theft.

You’ll find that the cost of these new technologies and techniques compare very favourably with the price of paying a ransom or recovering from a disaster.
Contact Neuways to learn about how we can make your data and business safer.