Unraveling the Causes Behind 60% of Data Backup Failures During Critical Business Needs

Source: Vector Choice - URS Preferred Partner

The Need for Robust Data Backup: Insights and Best Practices

In today's digital landscape, businesses face various threats to their data integrity, ranging from natural disasters to cyber-attacks and human error. As highlighted by Avast's recent findings on disaster recovery, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are particularly vulnerable, with 60% of data backups failing to fully succeed. Even more concerning is the fact that half of the attempts to recover data from these backups are unsuccessful, resulting in an average downtime of 79 minutes, costing roughly $84,650 for every hour of disruption.

Understanding the Common Causes of Backup Failures:

1. Reliability of Backup Products: The adage "you get what you pay for" holds true in the realm of backups. Free or inexpensive solutions may lack the robust features needed for secure and reliable data backup.

2. Suboptimal Backup Timing: Poorly scheduled backups, especially during peak traffic periods or when data is being heavily modified, pose a risk of incomplete data capture.

3. Compatibility Issues: As businesses evolve, so do their systems and software. However, new systems may not always be fully compatible with existing backup solutions, leading to data saving and restoration challenges.

4. Human Error: Incorrectly configured backup parameters, accidental file deletions, and oversight of backup schedules and alerts can contribute to backup failures.

The Importance of Effective Data Backup and Restoration:

In light of these challenges, implementing best practices for data backup and restoration is crucial for ensuring business continuity and mitigating risks:

1. Choose a Reliable Backup Solution: Avoid blindly opting for well-known backup software brands. Instead, conduct thorough research to identify a solution that aligns with your business needs. Consider factors such as data recovery speed, downtime implications, and compliance requirements, especially in regulated industries like healthcare.

2. Adhere to the 3-2-1 Backup Rule: Embrace the industry-standard 3-2-1 backup rule, which recommends maintaining three copies of data in two different formats, with one copy stored off-site. This approach minimizes the risk of data loss in case of a catastrophic event.

3. Monitor Backup Status Daily: Ensure that someone within your organization, whether yourself or a designated IT team member, checks the backup status daily. Promptly address any incomplete backups to avoid potential data loss.

4. Conduct Regular Restore Tests: Regularly conduct simulated data restoration exercises to verify the integrity and effectiveness of your backup system. This proactive approach ensures that your backups are functional and can be relied upon in times of crisis.

In conclusion, data backups are not a "set and forget" task but a critical aspect of business continuity planning. By implementing robust backup solutions and adhering to best practices, businesses can safeguard their data against unforeseen disruptions and minimize the impact of potential disasters.

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Scaling Up: How VoIP Flexibly Grows with Your Business

Source: Vector Choice - URS Preferred Partner

As a business owner, you're well aware of the necessity of having a communication infrastructure that aligns with your company's growth trajectory. Traditional phone systems often pose challenges in terms of scalability and cost-effectiveness, particularly when expanding to accommodate new locations, staff, or functionalities. Enter Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

VoIP presents a forward-looking solution suitable for businesses of all sizes and across diverse sectors, including finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and legal services. Here's how VoIP delivers the scalability essential for your business's flourishing:

1. Effortless Expansion: Unlike the intricate setup involved in traditional phone lines, VoIP simplifies the process of adding new lines. Through an intuitive online portal, you can effortlessly incorporate extensions for new team members or additional phone numbers for expanded operations.

2. Cost-Effective Growth: VoIP obviates the need for costly hardware upgrades and extra phone lines. You pay solely for the features and extensions essential to your business needs, rendering it a financially prudent choice for burgeoning enterprises.

3. Remote Work Facilitation: With VoIP, geographical boundaries cease to be a hindrance. Your workforce can seamlessly operate from any location with internet connectivity, fostering collaboration and productivity irrespective of physical constraints.

4. Scalable Features: VoIP systems boast an array of customizable features tailored to your unique requirements. From voicemail transcription and automated attendants to video conferencing and call recording, you have the flexibility to select features that empower your team and elevate customer interactions.

5. Seamless Integration: Contemporary VoIP solutions seamlessly integrate with existing business applications such as CRM software and project management platforms. This integration streamlines workflows and enhances overall communication efficacy, ensuring a cohesive operational environment.

In essence, VoIP offers not just scalability, but also versatility and cost efficiency, making it a pivotal asset for your business's sustained growth and success.

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3 CIS Resources to Help You Drive Your Cloud Cybersecurity

Source: Center for Internet Security

Author: Don Freeley, VP of It services, CIS
In the process of moving to the cloud, you need a security-first cloud migration strategy that considers both your security and compliance requirements upfront. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how you can use resources from the Center for Internet Security® (CIS®) to create such an approach.

Security Choices in the Cloud

To create a cloud security program, you have two main options to consider. As your first option, you can choose to manage the security of your workloads yourself. The advantage of choosing this route is that you will implement a custom fit to your organization and the needs of your business. However, you might not have knowledge of cloud security best practices, in-house expertise, or the desire to spend significant resources towards cloud security management. Cloud security is complex, requiring different technical skill sets and tooling than on-premises security programs.

Alternatively, you can buy pre-configured or managed services to create a comprehensive cloud security program. In doing so, you'll get to use a partner or product as a force multiplier that will enable you to safely operate in the cloud without incurring unnecessary technical debt and expense. This option can be especially helpful if you're in the beginning stages of wanting to keep your cloud secure.

Neither of the two options discussed above is better than the other. It's about identifying your organization's needs and selecting a method that works best for you to achieve them. 

Getting Started with CIS Resources in the Cloud

At CIS, our mission is to make the connected world a safer place. We have numerous tools and resources that can help organizations of every size make their cloud migration journey simpler and more secure. Let's go over them below.

The CIS Critical Security Controls® (CIS Controls®)

The CIS Controls consist of prescriptive, prioritized, and simplified security best practices that you can use to strengthen your cybersecurity posture across your environments, including in the cloud. The CIS Controls v8 Cloud Companion Guide provides context around how each Control applies not only to the cloud but also to individual service models, what your responsibility looks like for a Control within applicable service models, and what products, tools, and threat information (if any) you need to consider. In that way, you can plan your implementation efforts to maximize your time, effort, and efficacy.

The CIS Benchmarks™

The CIS Benchmarks are secure configuration guidelines developed through consensus that you can use to harden your operating systems (OSes) across 25+ vendor product families. Their security recommendations don't just map back to the Controls; they are also referenced by several industry frameworks such as PCI DSS and HIPAA.

In the context of the cloud, the Benchmarks have several resources to help. These are the Foundations Benchmarks, the Compute Benchmarks, and the CIS Build Kits and CIS Configuration Assessment Tool (CIS-CAT)®.

The CIS Foundations Benchmarks

The CIS Foundations Benchmarks are designed to help you create foundational security in the cloud by focusing on three essential areas: identity and access management (IAM), logging and monitoring, and networking. They consist of 50-60 security recommendations so that you can get started in the cloud and quickly set up essential security policies on a specific cloud service provider (CSP) platform.

Each CIS Foundations Benchmark includes sections that tell you exactly which CSP services we cover. Some are essential to your security. As an example, our CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark includes a section that says, "Ensure MFA is enabled on the root account." You need to use Amazon IAM to configure that recommendation. By contrast, other sections depend on the consumption of your service. If you don't use Amazon EC2, for instance, you can disregard those recommendations.

The CIS Cloud Service Category Benchmarks

The Foundations Benchmarks' 50-60 recommendations intentionally make it easy for you to create foundational security on a CSP platform. From there, you can take additional efforts to holistically secure your could environment using the CIS Cloud Service Category Benchmarks, like the CIS AWS Compute Services Benchmark. These resources tell you which security recommendations to implement if you're using specific services that are beyond the scope of the Foundations Benchmarks. In that way, you can securely configure your use of cloud services for compute, databases, storage, and other services in a CSP.

CIS Build Kits and CIS-CAT

The Benchmarks, including the Foundations Benchmarks and Cloud Service Category Benchmarks, are available in Word, Excel, and PDF formats. However with CIS-CAT, you can speed policy to implementation and automate your evaluation of your systems' configurations against other Benchmarks. You can also easily customize and rapidly apply the Benchmarks recommendations using the CIS Build Kits to remediate your system, which are available as Group Policy Objects and Bash shell scripts.

CIS Hardened Images®

You're ultimately responsible for the security of a guest operating system (OS) on virtual machine images in the cloud. This can be difficult to do. As mentioned previously, the CIS Benchmarks are documents that point the way to system hardening, but without additional resources, you'll need to manually implement the 200-300 security recommendations in the cloud one by one.

Fortunately, CIS Hardened Images can help! These virtual machine images are pre-configured to the security recommendations of the CIS Benchmarks. In that sense, you can spin up a pre-hardened OS without having to spend time and money on manual hardening.

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