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If cash is the lifeblood of an organization, data is the heart. Consider just how integral business data is in your organization – from your contact list in Microsoft Outlook to your customer records. What would you do if you lost this data? Would your business survive a complete data failure? Minimizing risk should be a top priority for small to midsized enterprises, but many don’t have a backup data plan to ensure they can recover from a disaster.
One of the greatest threats to your business's data security is ransomware, a type of computer virus that affects your data’s security. It’s easy to get infected with ransomware. Most often, an employee clicks a link that appears legitimate in an email from what looks like a reputable source (e.g., your email provider or financial institution). Ransomware targets your databases and encrypts the data so you can’t access it, then follows up with an email demanding payment – the ‘ransom’ – to decrypt the data. If you don’t pay the ransom, you lose your data. Sometimes, you lose your data even if you do pay the ransom.
Unfortunately, ransomware attacks are common in the small-to-midsized enterprise (SME) market. According to the Beazley Group, a specialist insurer, the highest ransom paid in 2018 was over USD $930,000. The losses SMEs face aren’t limited to the ransom money, either – the cost of disaster recovery and downtime associated with data loss can cost even more.
Consider how a ransomware attack would affect your business. How would you recover from losing customer records? Could you service them without order information, and how would that affect your finance department? Could you maintain service? Could you forecast demand for the next quarter to decide on production without access to your historical data?
According to the US Department of Homeland Security and most IT service providers surveyed, the number one solution for ransomware protection is a backup and disaster recovery solution. Training your employees to be vigilant for fraudulent emails and avoid opening attachments can help, but eventually, someone will make a mistake. Unfortunately, one mistake will affect your entire organization.
In the How to Prepare Your Business for Disaster webinar, you’ll learn how to protect your data from ransomware and other disasters. Vision33’s Carlos Aparicio discusses objectives and best practices for disaster recovery plans and business continuity plans. You’ll also see a success story about a business recently affected by a wildfire, and how Vision33 got them back up and running.
