Step One For Protecting Your Technology

Information Technology can be pretty overwhelming.  There are lots of acronyms, abbreviations, and buzzwords you have to know just to do your everyday work.  On top of that you have tons of vendors and sales reps that want to sell you some kind of server, software, or service to protect you from all that can go wrong.  How do you evaluate all this technology when you barely understand it?  If you're like most people you get overwhelmed and procrastinate.  Really, who wants to go home after putting a long day at work and start working on their technology protection strategy.

The first step that I recommend to anyone working on a technology protection strategy is to visualize what they would do when confronted with the most common technology disasters.  Sure you may need protection from a potential hacker that might try to break into your network Oceans 11 style, but those types of break-ins are relatively rare for small businesses.  However I can almost guarantee one of these problems will happen to your business in the next three years:




  1. Hard drive failure.  If you haven't had this happen before, it's only a matter of time until you experience it.  Imagine one day you go to your computer and power it on, only to find that it can't find an operating system, and all you get is a black screen staring back at you.  You take the computer to your "tech" person, and they say the hard drive is dead, any information on it is lost forever.  Now picture this scenario with each computer, laptop, or server that you own.  What would you do?  Who would you call? How long could you live without that data?  Could you live without it forever?
  2. Malware Infection.  No matter how careful you are, someday one of your computers will get a malware infection.  This will result in your computer running very slowly, pop up screens will come up, and programs will stop working correctly.  Usually it will leave your computer in an unusable state.  Your "tech" person will probably recommend wiping out your computer and starting all over again from scratch.  This will be a very similar situation as the hard drive failure.  How long could you live without your computer?  Could you stand to lose all your data?  
  3. Lost or Stolen Computer.  Imagine coming back to your car and seeing your window smashed in.  Your laptop has been stolen.  Did it have sensitive customer information?  Did it have credit card numbers, bank account numbers, logins to sensitive websites?  Here's another scenario, you went out to lunch and left your smartphone on the table.  The phone's gone missing and all hope of getting it back is gone.  Your phone was connected to your company's email, and you had hundreds of business contacts in your phone.  Will that information be safe?
The answer for most people will be, "I don't know if I'm ok or not."  And that answer is to be expected, but which scenario makes you the most nervous?  Which one do you think you couldn't recover from?  Once you've come up with the scenario that will cost you the most money or pain, start there with your planning.

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