Backups are critical to preventing relentless attacks on your computers.

An estimated 24% of emails are malicious, which amounts to approximately 3.4 billion daily phishing emails. This means that roughly one in four emails you receive could be harmful.

Additionally, over 317 million ransomware attacks were attempted in 2023, which rose to more than 439 million in 2024. Consequently, it is not a matter of whether you will experience an attack but when it will occur. On average, recovering from such an attack takes about 22 days.

What can you do to help prevent your business from being attacked?

Train employees on the safe handling of emails.

1. Train your staff on handling emails. If you receive an unexpected email from a company you are unfamiliar with, delete it. When in doubt, throw it out.

2. Enhance employee skills with our Security Awareness Training programs. We can assess your staff and provide training for those needing extra support. Contact Kristine for more information.

3. We utilize email systems that scan for malicious messages, such as the security gateway provided by Computer Team, Inc., for all our hosted email clients. While nothing can catch everything, every precaution helps.

Backup, Backup, and Backup

1. Make sure to have high-quality backups by keeping multiple copies of your data.

2. At Computer Team, Inc., we back up critical database data every hour.

   1. The initial backup of this data is stored locally on our primary backup server.

   2. The second copy of this data is sent to our off-site second data center backup server.

   3. The third copy of this data is stored in our iDrive cloud storage every hour.

   4. The subsequent five copies of this data are on air-gapped backup drives that change daily.

3. As for our servers and critical workstations, we back them up daily.

   1. The initial backup of this data is stored locally on our primary backup server.

   2. The second copy of this data is sent to our off-site second data center backup server.

   3. The third copy of this data is put into our cloud storage with iDrive daily.

   4. The subsequent five copies of this data are on air-gapped backup drives that change daily.

4. We will add a new copy of these critical backup files when we deploy our immutable backup server. Immutable backup storage allows the backup software to write the data, and then, depending on how it was configured, those files cannot be touched or changed for whatever time frame you set. Therefore, hackers who enter your systems cannot touch or encrypt those backups.