Don’t be the office Grinch this Christmas, prepare your technology and systems to reduce downtime risk, avoid disrupting your customers’ holiday season and your employees’ holiday fun.

Is Now A Good Time To Update / Upgrade Your IT?

If you are expecting a surge in business over the upcoming Christmas / New Year time you will need to plan ahead and apply system updates and / or perform upgrades before the rush.

If business slows down over this period, then is now a good time to implement any upgrades or changes you have been putting off? So start planning things now, so you won’t encounter issues when your business starts to ramp up in January.

Safeguard business data

Unless you are in retail, most businesses tend to slow down over the Christmas / New Year time. But the cyber bad guys don’t take breaks and in fact they generally ramp up during this time.  In 2020, the greatest number of daily DDoS attacks in Q4 were on December 31, with over 1,349 attacks recorded globally on that day. So, don’t be lax over this time and make sure your cybersecurity policies are known to all your staff during this time.

So, make sure you are protecting systems, detecting threats, defending against attacks and that you staff have a refresher course in cyber security. A security assessment can help determine what you are doing well and what could be done better. This can be internal or done by an external party (with greater objectivity). If you have compliance or regulatory concerns, try an external IT security auditor.

Test backup and recovery

You may diligently perform a backup each day but have you ever tested that backup to make sure it is working and / or backing up all your data? We highly recommend testing your backup to:

• ensure you can effectively access the backup device and then actually open and use the data;
• confirm that all you data is being backed up;
• check that the backup is being run each day;
• identify and fix any issues that arise during recovery.

Best practice is to have your backed up data in three places:

• on a device locally in your office (this may be the external hard drive connected tot the network / server.
• on a device located offsite (this may be your other hard drives which are kept offsite).
• in the cloud.

‘Tis The Season For Celebration!

Keep your equipment in tip top shape, and you will have a happy holiday season rather than worrying about another IT problem!

If you are in Australia and need help maintaining and securing your IT or looking for data backup and business continuity, contact us now.