Network Innovation Solutions Blog

World Backup Day falls on March 31^st each year, giving you at least one annual opportunity to check in on your data backups. 

Are your backups sufficiently reliable? Would you be able to operate strictly from backed-up data if you suddenly lost access?

These are important questions that we can help you answer! We’ve just published a new blog post outlining best practices for solid backups—including how the 3-2-1 Backup Rule works and why frequent testing is so critical.

On World Backup Day, We Wanted to Ask… How Does Your Strategy Look?

Are You Already Relying on Us for Backup? Rest assured that we proactively monitor and regularly test your solution to verify it’s effective.

Looking for Backup Assistance? Contact us to discuss how we can customize the right approach to reinforce and protect your crucial data. Whether you need a fresh backup plan or just a review of your current setup, we’ll help ensure you’re prepared for any data disruption—from hardware failures to cyberattacks.

Make every day World Backup Day… because the safety of your data is always worth the effort.

March 31st—is World Backup Day, an annual reminder to think about how well you’re protecting your data. Is your business prepared to prevent—or recover from—a data loss disaster? And while you’re at it, have you taken steps to back up your personal information as well?

There Are Lots of Aspects to Properly Backing Up Your Data

There’s a Formula to Follow to Get Reliable Backups

First, any business that commits to backing up its data must do so properly. By today’s standards, this means that a company needs to abide by a widely accepted and stress-tested approach.

This approach is known as the 3-2-1 Backup Rule:

• Maintain at least three copies of your data
• This data is stored in at least two different types of storage media
• At least one copy of your data is stored offsite, ideally in the cloud

This combination of behaviors can prevent truly catastrophic data loss, as long as the backup is tested to ensure it works properly. It is not unheard of for businesses to discover that their backups were failing after they were needed.

Just imagine the feeling in your stomach if you think you have a nightly backup, only to find out it’s been overwriting itself continuously—leaving you with no recoverable version of the data you lost days earlier. 

This is not uncommon, unfortunately, and many businesses have suffered from exactly this issue.

To avoid these pitfalls, automate your backups to occur regularly, retain multiple versions, and test them often. That way, if an issue is accidentally carried forward in newer backups, you still have a clean copy to restore.

Backups Are Also a Security Tool

A solid backup strategy can be utilized to mitigate some unpleasant impacts of cybersecurity threats. Consider ransomware, which blocks you from accessing your own data. Having a  regularly updated backup, with multiple versions on hand allows you to restore access without having to consider paying a ransom.

What happens if—a laptop workstation or mobile device—is lost or stolen? While you’ll still have some problems to overcome, having all your data backed up prevents its potential loss if the device you use to access it is no longer accessible.

Maintaining a backup helps you in such disasters by giving you something to fall back on if your data is impacted by whatever event you suffer from.

Don’t Forget Your Personal Data

While most of our focus is on business, personal data is just as important to protect. All those family photos, important documents, or creative projects shouldn’t be left vulnerable. Applying the same 3-2-1 Backup Rule at home goes a long way toward keeping your memories and personal records safe. After all, data is data, whether it belongs to a company or an individual.

Every Day Should Be World Backup Day

While March 31st is the official backup reminder, you should be thinking about data backups every day. We do. 

We specialize in crafting customized, automated backup solutions to help you maintain business continuity and secure your data.

If you’re already relying on us for your business backup, rest assured that we proactively monitor and regularly test to verify it remains effective. 

If you are not relying on us yet, consider this a reminder to prepare a backup, or review your current one for comprehensiveness, not only this World Backup Day but regularly throughout the year, ensuring all your data is being saved redundantly and securely.

If you are unsure about the status of or strategy of your backup we are more than happy to take a look and help you address it. Call us at 304-781-3410.

Make every day World Backup Day… because the safety of your data is always worth the effort.

This is Employee Appreciation Week. Each day this week on social media we will be featuring one of our exceptional staff to showcase how much we appreciate them! (And reintroduce them to you!) NIS would not be the success that it is without the wonderful support staff we have. We are grateful for each of them.

With today’s cybercriminals becoming increasingly sophisticated, they are constantly targeting your employees to gain unauthorized access to your data. Many times, this comes in the form of a phishing attack. The consequences of a successful phishing attack can be difficult for your business and can lead to financial losses, data breaches, and significant damage to your reputation. For this reason, it is essential that you do something to confront this issue. One of the best actions you can take is to properly train your staff to recognize and respond to phishing attempts.

Training to Expand Your Staff’s Knowledge

You Need to Provide Comprehensive Training to Confront Phishing Attacks

Phishing attacks account for a large percentage of today’s data breaches. These attacks are designed to deceive your employees into revealing personal information, interacting with malicious hyperlinks, or downloading harmful attachments. Unfortunately, a single successful phishing attempt can compromise your entire network and cause real operational problems.

At NIS, we can help you customize a training program designed to educate your employees on the most common phishing tactics and provide them with practical tools to identify and avoid these threats. By raising awareness and putting a thorough process in place, you can build employee confidence that they can really be your organization’s first line of defense against cybercriminals.

What Comprehensive Phishing Training Looks Like

Providing Employees with Knowledge and Resources to Protect Your Business and Their Own Personal Data

We believe that there is a combination of actions any phishing training strategy must have. They include:

• Real-world simulations - Deploy interactive phishing simulations that mimic actual phishing attempts to test and improve your team's response.
• Provide up-to-date information - You should provide training that is regularly updated to reflect the latest phishing trends and techniques.
• Role-based training - Not all phishing attacks are created equal. You’ll want to make available customized content for different roles within your organization, ensuring that everyone, from entry-level staff to executives, is well-equipped to handle phishing threats.
• Comprehensive reporting - Using analytics to provide valuable insights into your team's performance can help you to identify areas for improvement and track individual progress over time.

By combining these efforts and actions, you can better prepare your team to protect your business and the data it contains.

We Can Help!

Don't wait for a phishing attack to compromise you. Invest in the security of your organization with the help from our expert IT technicians by giving us a call today at 304-781-3410 to learn more about our comprehensive training programs and how we can help protect your business from cybercriminals.

Building Awareness to Strengthen Your Digital Defenses

Every October, individuals and organizations around the world observe Cybersecurity Awareness Month, a campaign designed to promote the importance of online safety and cybersecurity best practices. Since its inception in 2004 by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the National Cyber Security Alliance, Cybersecurity Awareness Month has grown into a global movement. The goal is to empower all people to protect their digital platforms through the sharing of knowledge.

Why Cybersecurity Awareness Matters

Nowadays, nearly every aspect of our lives depends on some sort of computing. Whether it be online banking or health care services, social media, or shopping, keeping your digital world secure has to be a priority. This isn’t always easy. The more people use online resources to work, communicate, and play, the more opportunists will look to get between people and steal and corrupt data. Phishing, ransomware, data breaches, and identity theft are just a few examples of the methods cybercriminals use.

Cybersecurity Awareness Month has become an important part of the shared responsibilities we all have to do our best to keep information safe. The fact is cyberthreats can target anyone, anywhere, making it essential for everyone to do their best to learn, and adhere to, solid cybersecurity strategies. This includes building and using strong passwords to implement multi-factor authentication, every small action can collectively add to the overall security of people all around the world.

How to Better “Secure Our World”

This year’s theme is Secure Our World and focuses on these four steps to improve the security of accounts:

• Enable strong authentication - Users will want to deploy multi-factor authentication (MFA) wherever possible. This extra layer of protection ensures that even if a password is compromised, attackers cannot easily access your accounts.
• Recognize and report phishing - Phishing attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated. It’s important to recognize suspicious correspondence and report them if you are in a position to do so.
• Update software regularly - Outdated software can leave you vulnerable to cyberattacks. Make sure your operating systems, apps, and antivirus programs are up to date.
• Create strong passwords - Probably the most important step is to create and use unique, complex passwords for each account and avoid using easily identifiable information in those passwords.

The Future of Cybersecurity

Unfortunately, even as security technology and strategies evolve, so do the methods used by cybercriminals. This is why ongoing education, training, and testing have become extremely important. Cybersecurity Awareness Month serves as an annual reminder that cyberthreats are real, and staying informed and proactive is the best defense against being a victim of hackers, scammers, and other opportunists.

If your business is at the point where you’re thinking about hiring a fulltime IT tech, congratulations! Having enough consistent needs to fill this role means you’ve worked hard and made good decisions that drove business growth. Our best advice? Don’t stop now!

Moving forward with hiring requires a lot of analysis to avoid major consequences down the line, though. One of the biggest decisions whether you’ll hire someone directly or use a third-party MSP (Managed Service Provider). In this article, we’ll get into the specifics of both scenarios.

Cyber criminals don’t just slip into your network with the help of some serious hacking skills.  In fact, there’s a much simpler way to do that... through your employees. 

Social engineering is a tactic hackers are using more and more frequently to infiltrate systems.  It involves a variety of approaches that focus on manipulating employees to drop standard security protocols.  And if you expect to protect your data these days, then you’ll have to take the necessary steps to educate and train your employees on how to detect and avoid these approaches. 

Opening unknown links can be a risk factor for your business and staff. As a result, more and more business owners have incorporated fake link prevention strategies into their security training. We’ve come up with a few tips to help ensure that your staff members have the critical information on how to spot fake links. This training can help prevent hackers from gaining access to your business. In cases like this, it is better to be proactive rather than reactive after a breach. 

With Windows 7 end of life quickly approaching, it’s time to start thinking about what needs to be done to prepare. Technically, regular Windows 7 support has been dead since 2015, however, the extended support period is over January 2020, which means no more updates or security patches. What should you be aware of for EOL? Get ready, you may have some work to do. 

You’ve all heard the panic. Windows is cutting off support for its widely popular version 7 software. January 14, 2020 will officially mark Windows 7 End of Life. Many companies have used Windows 7 since it launched in 2009 and are still actively using it today. So, what’s the big deal? Can you just stick with Windows 7 or will your computer self-destruct?