Tag Archives: backup

A Step-by-Step Guide to an Effective Digital Estate Planning

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In our previous blog, we began talking about the digital assets of a business—what they are, why they are vital to the business, and how to protect them. We have also mentioned how important it is to protect them even after you, the business owner, have passed away, through effective digital estate planning.

A digital estate plan will give authorized people access to business accounts, and all other restricted aspects of the business when you are no longer around or have become incapacitated. But how does one create an effective digital estate plan? It’s not something that you do every day. What are the things to include? How can you guarantee that the business you have worked so hard to build can go on properly? Here are the important steps that you need to take.

Take an Inventory of All Your Digital Assets

First, you need to create a list of all the digital assets of your business, which might encompass a wider range than you think. These are all the digital files that have value for your business, from photos and videos of your products to transaction records and everything in between. It also includes all accounts you maintain for your business. Taking inventory of your assets is an effective digital estate plan.

Decide How to Manage Your Digital Assets

For each item you have listed, you must specify how to proceed with it after you pass. Who will have access? What should be done with them? How do you want them managed? It is important to be clear and concise in leaving these instructions because they will be followed when you are no longer around to make clarifications.

In selecting your designated backup person, the one who will have control over the digital assets of your business when you cannot do so, pick one who is both capable and trustworthy. In addition, they should also be well-versed in the operations of your business.

Keep an Updated List of Passwords for an Effective Digital Estate Planning

Practically everything now is online and requires a login name and password. It is crucial to keep all of this login information in a place that is not only completely safe but also accessible to authorized entities when the time comes.

A great way to store your passwords as an effective digital estate plan is by using a password manager. Here, you can safely store any online credentials. It also conveniently allows any authorized entity to access the login information. With a password manager, you can also easily update the saved passwords whenever you change them.

Strengthen Your Digital Security

When a business owner passes away, there will be quite a few entities with a vested interest in the business. This people will try to get their hands on it. They might think that since the owner has died, no one would watch the gates, and getting in would be easier. This would not be true if you increased your data security as early as now.

Multi-factor authentication is one of the most popular methods people are using today as a login procedure. This is because it can add a robust layer of security to any account. Besides traditional passwords, you should also activate the use of one-time passcodes. This is to ensure that only authorized individuals will gain access to your digital assets.

Final Thoughts for an Effective Digital Estate Planning

Preparing in the event of death is no different with a company’s digital estate. To help you prepare for the inevitable, we have created a Digital Estate Planning Checklist and Password Cheat Sheet that you can download for free.

This guide contains a lot of useful information that you would need to organize a complete digital estate plan. This is one of many things you can do to protect your digital assets. If you have questions or need further assistance, our team is just a call away!

Protecting Your Business through Digital Estate Planning

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Cybersecurity, Data Backup, Security, Technology, , , ,

Keeping your business protected is very important. But you should ask yourself if you have all areas covered. Security cameras and restricted entry areas are vital for protecting the physical location. To protect employees, implement all their necessary rights and privileges, and so on. All this is important, but one thing to prioritize as a business owner is protecting your digital assets through digital estate planning.

What Are Digital Assets?

Digital assets comprise everything in your business that is, well, digital. These include data, software, applications, and intellectual property. If you are like most businesses today, your daily operations rely heavily on these digital assets. It makes sense that you safeguard them to the best of your ability with digital estate planning.

Effective Strategies for Protecting Digital Assets Using Digital Estate Planning

Cybercriminals are now very creative in launching their attacks, so business owners must be extra vigilant and meticulous in protecting digital assets. Here are some of the most effective strategies for digital estate planning that you can use.

Strong Passwords

It is surprising how many businesses today still use passwords that are so easy to crack. Hackers might have advanced strategies for infiltrating your system, but you can make their job much more difficult by using unique, complex, and strong passwords. Also, be sure to change passwords periodically to minimize the risk of a data breach. This is common practice for digital estate planning.

Access Controls

One of the easiest but most effective ways to protect your digital assets is to restrict access to them. This step will drastically reduce the risk of data falling into the wrong hands, and should there be a leak, it will be easier to trace where it originated.

Digital Estate Planning – Data Encryption

No matter how confident you are in your data security measures, you should never underestimate the capabilities of cybercriminals. In case they steal your data, high-level encryption will protect it from being exposed or used for illicit purposes. That is why a part of digital estate planning is always encrypting your data.

Biometrics

Biometrics is now a popular alternative to conventional sign-in methods. Not only is this more convenient for the users, but it also offers more security. Using fingerprints or facial recognition ensures that no one other than the allowed individual can log in. Also, people would no longer need to remember passwords or write them down, which only adds to the vulnerability of the old method.

Backup and Recovery

If anything happens, you should have a reliable data backup and recovery plan, which is essential for protecting digital assets. You must save and store backups regularly in multiple secure and protected locations.

Employee Training

Your employees can be valuable in protecting digital assets, but ironically, they are also usually the weakest link. With regular employee training, however, you can turn them into a robust first line of defense and circumvent most security threats.

Security Software

There is a wide range of software created for protecting digital assets, firewalls, threat detection applications, antivirus software, and so on. If you are unsure of which software to get, you can always enlist the help of an MSP who will recommend the best security solutions to match your needs.

Importance of Digital Estate Planning

An element of protecting digital assets is that many companies do not even think of digital estate planning. It is simply preparing your digital assets. This is so that an authorized person gains access to everything in the event of your death.

This might sound morbid, but it does not differ from other forms of estate planning. It also makes it easier for your business partners, beneficiaries, or heirs to continue the business when you are gone. As this could still be a new concept for some business owners, we have prepared a Digital Estate Planning Checklist and Password Cheat Sheet, both of which you can download for free.

In this, we delve into the advantages of having a digital estate plan, how to go about it, and why password management is a very important part of it. Our team is also ready to help you create a comprehensive digital estate plan, which is crucial for protecting your digital assets, even long after you are gone.

5 Security Measures that Neutralize Common Hacker Attacks

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Computer showing a popup warning that its system is being compromised by hackers.

Going without a Cyber Security plan is no longer an option in today’s business world.

In the war between business tech and hacker invasions, we often imagine hackers with a criminal sneer. They use technical ability and corrupted software to take advantage of the digitally vulnerable. The lonely elderly, small businesses, families in crisis, and hospitals are favorite targets in the hacker community. It’s a matter of personal and professional satisfaction to close any door such that hackers simply cannot get through – or prevent hackers from gaining benefit even from successful invasions. As cybersecurity technology gets more advanced, we are now specializing not only in making our walls too thick to crack but also thwarting hackers who try bottom-feeding and loophole-exploiting methods.

Today, the cybersecurity industry has perfected several tools that not only stop hacking attempts, but actively thwart and frustrate the hackers who attempt to steal your data. We’re here to share five easy methods that any small to enterprise business could implement that will neutralize the attempts of most common hacker attacks.

1) Unreadable Data Loot: End-to-End Encryption

Getting hacked eventually has come to be a business fact of life. Between an army of copy-pasted malware spammers and the few actual hacker-brains in the horde, eventually, something will skim your database or compromise one of your many cloud services. The only question is what your hackers find when they open the loot-bag after raiding your data.

Encryption is our best defense against the inevitable database swipe or website skim. Encryption ensures that hackers might have your data – but they have it so deeply encoded that your data is useless. Not a single username or business plan is stolen if your data is properly encrypted at every step in the creation, transit, and secure storage process.

2) Un-Phishable Email: Advanced Email Spam Filters

Email and social media phishing have become the leading method for hackers to slip their malware or scams into company systems. Phishing has become the top type of “hacking”, now called “social hacking” because it’s a scam with a dash of malware or espionage on the side.

Well, just like the spam-mail of old, phishing emails have become so common that we have learned how to recognize them. More importantly, our AIs can recognize them. Modern email filtering features include ways to detect then flag or filter any email that follows a known phishing message pattern. This keeps your entire workforce safe when installed into the company email server.

3) The Fool-Me-Twice: Blacklist and Report Every Attack

Let’s say you do get hacked – make sure your monitoring software is in place. The fool-me-twice maneuver ensures that you are never successfully targeted by the same methods or hacker domain twice.

Network monitoring services and malware tracking can reveal a lot of useful data that can protect you (and the whole community) in the future. If you get a source domain name, catch a malware ReadMe file, or track suspicious IP addresses – blacklist whatever you find. Then submit your collected evidence of the hack to your security regulatory board and federal authorities. The more known bad-actors are blacklisted, the fewer large-server hacks can be conducted against businesses and individuals.

4) UnRansomable: Backup and Disaster Recovery Plans

The threat of ransomware that cripples hospitals and businesses is the file encryption. Encryption used as a weapon can suddenly make your entire system’s data unavailable. But what if you have a complete and recent backup of the system? Would you really need to preserve the current malware-infected files? The answer we smugly give is “no”. A great backup and recovery system – with a smooth re-installation of everything you backed up – can ensure that even the worst system-wide ransomware can’t take your company down for more than a few hours.

If your system and all vital data is already backed up, you simply cannot be held for ransom. You can factory-reset on that malware and have your system running again without paying a single bit-coin or decrypting your files.

5) Un-Hackable Team: Cybersecurity Drills

Last but certainly not least, you can also empower your entire team with a fun security-building exercise. Cybersecurity drills are conducted by your IT team to help employees (and execs) across all departments learn how to protect themselves from phishing and common malware attacks. Start with training, teaching everyone how to spot, stop, and report any suspected hacking attempt. Then release occasional faux-phishing emails and other suspicious tactics to keep everyone on their toes.

Congratulate employees with sharp eyes and uplift the team when a drill is detected and reported correctly. Once your team associates reporting a phishing email with Friday cupcakes, hackers won’t stand a chance.

Looking to optimize your company tech solutions and cybersecurity? Contact us for more great insights and to consult on your business security needs.

Types of Backup and Storage Plans

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What are my backup options for my business?

At this point in the digital transformation, most businesses are aware that computer and data backups are essential. The ability to restore your information and your infrastructure is a safety precaution that it would be foolish not to have prepared. If a hacker ransomwares your network, a good backup can make it possible to simply wipe and restore instead of fretting about lost files. If a natural disaster takes out your office building, the right backups can allow you to completely set up shop somewhere new.

But not all backups are equal. Backups built and managed by a hands-on IT team are likely going to have a few more useful traits and features than a default backup system set-and-forgotten out of the box. Let’s take a closer look at the differences you might see in your backups and improvements that can be made to any business backup system.

Local vs Cloud Backups

The first important backup decision to make is where to store them. Backups are compressed, but they are still huge files that contain copies of entire databases, networks, and operating systems. Backups stored locally are more accessible, you don’t even need outside internet access to copy, open, and restore from local backups. Local backups are faster and more convenient in the office, but they are also more vulnerable.

If the server banks containing your local backups are damaged or disrupted, your backups could be lost. Fire, flood, sabotage, and self-spreading malware all put your local backups at risk.

Cloud backups are absolutely safe. Cloud server storage is not just remote from your location, it’s also distributed so that copies of your backups are stored in storage repositories all over the world. You will always be able to access your backups, and your backups will be safe from all but the most insidious server-host attacks. You can even download your backups from the cloud to restore a computer in an entirely remote location.

But cloud backups must be downloaded every time you make a restoration and uploaded to the cloud every time a new backup is taken, which can be a real pinch with limited or metered bandwidth.

Automated vs Manual Backups

The next question is how you handle your regular backups. Backups must be made periodically so that the data is up-to-date if you need to restore your systems from a backup. But when and how do you take those new backups? Manual backups are those taken by a person enacting the backup process. They may be entering a series of commands or even hand-copying data from one server to another.

Automated backups are when a program runs itself to make copies of all the necessary data and then stores those copies where they can be found if a recovery is needed. Automated backups take up far less time, but much be managed. If an automated backup malfunctions or if the process is flawed, it might create useless backups while creating a false sense of security.

Data vs Infrastructure Backups

Now consider the size and complexity of your backups. There are many different ways to take backups based on how you expect to enact recoveries and restorations. Some businesses only bother to backup one server of data or just one database because everything else they need or use is a SaaS program or cloud service that doesn’t need to be backed up. Data backups are those that only include data that will be reloaded into a fresh identical server.

On the other hand, some businesses intentionally backup the entire infrastructure for each workstation, server, and network. With a more comprehensive backup, you can create an identical work environment beyond your most important data. Infrastructure backups make for faster recoveries and far less new installation setup for workstations that are wiped and recovered.

What types of backups and recovery plans will work best for your business? It all depends on how much downtime you can afford and how much risk your data may be facing. If you’d like to consult on managed IT backup and recovery services for your business, contact us today!