National Computer Security Day 2021: Innovec’s 5 Steps to Stay Safe Online
Unless, like us, you run an IT business, we know you don’t want to spend all your time worrying about IT.
What’s more, for growing businesses, managing technology without endless budget or resource can become a painful, expensive, and thankless task. You need to know that the system you have invested in improves things for your team and protects your business from cyber threats.
For National Computer Security Day 2021, we’ve listed 5 steps that you can take to minimise cyber risk to your business systems.
1. Update devices to the latest version
When a product becomes unsupported and outdated, it instantly becomes much more accessible and attractive to hackers. Software vendors and app developers continually update their products to both ensure that users can take advantage of the latest enhancements in technology but also to keep their software safe from the ever-evolving approaches of hackers and malware.
2. Check Anti-Virus and Firewalls
Under Security settings on your machine, you will find information about your firewall or malware, whether it’s on or not, and the option to run a scan to check for any viruses. If you receive a notification that there may be a virus on your machine, or that there may be an issue with you firewall, don’t ignore it, speak to your IT support immediately and get it fixed.
3. Remove Unused Programs
This is a combination of the points outlined in reference to knowing where your data is and keeping systems on the latest version. It can be easy to download a free trial of software, an app that your friend recommended or just something which was needed as a one-off years ago. Every program presents an opportunity for someone to access your device. If it is unused, it will become out of date, unsupported and could become a target.
4. Manage Backups and Data
The mass availability of devices, apps and cloud technology has created a situation where almost every single action we carry out results in us creating or consuming data which can be accessed by malicious third parties if not managed properly.
Make sure you know what systems are being used in your business, where data is being processed by your team and your customers and ensure that this remains within agreed parameters and defined processes.
Backups are critical. In the event of a cyber-attack which corrupts your data, how many days could your business survive and retain customer trust when you do not have access to your data? Unfortunately, you often only find out that back-ups have failed when you need them the most.
At Innovec, in addition to automated reports and alerts, our team personally check every customer backup on a weekly basis to ensure that nothing has failed unexpectedly. This means that even in the absolute worst-case scenario your last available back up will always be within the last few days.
5. Engage with a proven partner
If you are unsure about your IT setup or current support arrangement, ask them: When was our last successful/failed back up? When was the last update applied to our server/operating systems? What anti-virus do we use and why?
At Innovec, we combine ESET’s comprehensive security solution with our expert IT engineers so that your system is not only protected with sophisticated, multi-layered defence technology, but real people, who proactively monitor and fix your security setup – so that you don’t have to.