Business Continuity and Reduced Downtime, Allowing SMEs to Thrive
Storing back-ups can mean a business surviving when others don’t. Effective disaster recovery means peace of mind and increased productivity.
In days gone by disaster recovery meant protecting against the 4 F’s – Fire, Flood, ‘Feft and Failure. Things have moved on and there is a new type of disaster more prevalent than its predecessors – the threat of a digital disaster, where cybercrime could cripple your business in minutes.
The WannaCry attack in May was the first worm based ransomware attack that self-propagated across 295,000 devices over 150 countries in only a few hours. It spread through vulnerabilities within the operating systems of computers that had not been properly maintained.
Do you know anyone who has been affected?
In January 2017 the media reported that fraud and cybercrime are now the UK’s most common offences. More than five and a half million cyber offences are now thought to take place each year accounting for almost half of all crime in the country. Yet on a fraction are reported to the police as victims feel embarrassed or feel that the perpetrators will not be caught.
Last year the Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW) survey found that the the total number of all offences in the 12 months to September 2016 topped 11.8 million, of which 3.6 million were fraud and further 2 million were related to computer misuse.
Prevention
ICO Systems take prevention seriously and look to companies like Microsoft and WatchGuard for solutions. Microsoft have designed security from the ground up within its Office 365 and Azure products. WatchGuard’s anti-virus, threat detection and response solutions are designed to find any threats, report them and take quick and effective action. Enterprise level firewalls are now available to SMEs at SME prices, which means you not only get intrusion prevention but data loss prevention, malware detection and quarantine, and also threat detection and response software.
In the weeks ahead we’ll be talking more about what’s available from the new breed of enterprise level firewalls and how they can keep your systems secure. We will also take a look at cloud solutions where you are entrusting the cloud provider to keep your data safe. We know the businesses we work with want us to keep them abreast of threats and advances in protection and these blogs are designed to keep you aware and informed.
Preparation
However, the simple fact is that nothing is ever 100% secure, and preparation for ‘when the worst happens’ is important. All businesses need to make sure they have a robust Backup and good Disaster Recovery Plan in place.
Digital storage has grown enormously and businesses need to make sure they have considered every element of their business data so they have adequate data backups. Complex data management can mean data replication which make getting back online and reducing downtime more difficult.
When you work with ICO Systems, your business is our business. We understand that continued smooth service is important to our customers.
If you run an SME, ask yourself the following questions:
- Are you backing up everything you need to completely recover from a disaster?
- How safely is your data backed-up?
- Could your data backup be simpler and how quickly can you restore it?
- How much would down time cost you?
- Can you easily scale your data storage up or down?
You may have a limited budget, limited time and often limited head space to deal with tech issues. You need technology which fits seamlessly into your business and once you’ve taken the time to implement a solution you want to be content in the knowledge that it’s a stable and safe environment.
The ICO System team have the expertise to create a solution to fit your business needs, with a flexible and affordable package. Our holistic approach to disaster recovery means we build in redundancies so when our client’s systems are down their businesses are not. Increased connectivity means businesses are often ‘always-on’. Competing in a world where huge quantities of data are produced and stored means businesses need a solution they can rely on.
No small business wants to think about what happens if or when things go wrong, but when it comes to online infrastructure it’s not something they can avoid. We are proud to be a Microsoft Silver Partners covering Cloud Platforms, Cloud Productivity plus Small and Midmarket Cloud Solutions across East Anglia.
A Cloud Built on Trust.
At ICO Systems we have years of experience working with our clients to build solutions to meet their storage needs. Today we use that knowledge to help create cloud based solutions they can trust. SMEs sometimes consider their size to be prohibitive to effective cloud storage and this is something Microsoft Azure is set to change. Azure’s cloud system allows business to grow their IT infrastructure in line with their business needs.
We often see businesses with inadequate storage, no back up contingencies, who are trying to manage a complex set of data requirements. That’s where our expertise comes in. We help our clients to avoid costly downtime and plan for their future data requirements all while staying flexible and being able to add extra functionality.
If you’d like more details simply email us at support@icosystems.co.uk for more details.
