With the year rapidly coming to an end it is now time to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a very happy New Year for 2015.

Wow where did 2014 go? Here at ProcessIT the year has flown through. We welcomed several new Clients to whom we developed Custom Applications including some exciting some exiting hybrid Desktop and Cloud systems and of course continued the developments and refinements for our existing Clients, including updates to systems that were developed when I was a sole trader over ten years ago and necessitated digging through old archives to locate the original source code to update. (Back then Windows XP was still hot and Office 2003 was the new kid on the block!) -A big thank you to you all for your support throughout the year.

 

Tech Tip – Backups

With the end of the year hitting soon it’s a great time to re-evaluate your backup processes! Key items to investigate include:

• Are they still working as expected?
• Are they fully automated or do you miss some when busy?
• Do your backups capture all the Data Locations you store information? –Folders / Drives / Networks / Cloud storage?
• Is the current backup interval still appropriate?
• Are your backups secure from hackers, disgruntled staff (your own or service providers) and if relevant, foreign governments?
• Do you have more than one or a set, in case your primary one is corrupt or it has been some time since the loss occurred and was noticed?
• Have you actually verified your backups can be used to restore your data?

The last point is critical and often overlooked! I recall an incident when a client had lost a key file, identified the backup, only to find that the backup device had filled up and no backup was available for the past three months! How can you possibly attempt to reproduce all the information from the last three months???

What about your information stored in the “cloud” what process does your provider use to ensure integrity and recovery? How long will you be down while you await someone to respond to your support ticket?

Remember the key is to enable a complete business restoration in the event of a small or catastrophic failure. This may include the complete loss of your premises! –Do you have off site backups as well?

Hopefully answering these will help ensure your business continues to flourish in the New Year and well into the future.

 

Wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year for 2015…