Earlier this week our house was burgled. The most painful losses were my laptop, and a suitcase of my late mother in law’s lifelong memorabilia - irreplaceable. The loss of these items made me think about general security and protecting our personal information.
A couple of years ago Himself insisted we move our home environment to the cloud. As all building projects in our place usually turn into a saga I wasn’t overly keen. However the catalyst, as it is with most businesses, was the impending death of our server. There was some initial pain, and quite a bit of whinging until I had reorganised my filing system and become used to the cloud environment. Himself also insisted on password protection for my laptop, and I’m now very glad he did. Like my father and his complaints about slow trains which deliberately turned boom gates against him, I will no longer complain about two factor authentication. The upshot of our burglary, other than mess strewn everywhere, is merely the purchase of a new laptop. All my precious personal information (including 35 years of genealogical research) is safe in the cloud, accessible only by me and from anywhere in the world.
As our work environment is in the cloud, in the event of a catastrophe we could feasibly resume operations quite quickly, with staff either working from home, or via a serviced office. An added bonus? Updating the Disaster Recovery Plan each year is relatively simple.
What are the benefits?
Some of the benefits of moving to the cloud:
- Better security. Two factor authentication provides stronger login security. Backups are now automatic.
- Improved accessibility and efficiency. Staff can work from anywhere. Updates are automatic (previously quite disruptive). An appalling filing clerk, SharePoint’s versioning has been a major time saver for me.
- Cost savings. Reducing hardware had a major impact on electricity bills. Eliminating offsite backups also saved money.
We work closely with your managed services/network support professionals to ensure a smooth transition from on premise to cloud environments. Depending on what you need, we may be able to modify existing systems ready to move to the cloud. If, like us, you decide to modernise and streamline your new environment we can assist you with that too.
What else?
A few weeks ago I was part of a tour group visiting the world renowned Cyber Security unit at Edith Cowan University. Although a sobering visit, it did introduce us to a useful and free tool we would like to share: https://haveibeenpawned.com/ The site is interesting to explore as some very large company websites have been compromised over the past 5 years, many of which we have all used.
My private email address was identified as having been compromised via a well-known newspaper portal and two leading genealogy websites. By the time I had changed the password on one of these accounts hackers appear to have captured it. Recently I received several extortion emails via my work email, which I would have normally deleted, but as they mentioned a password I used frequently in the past I began to panic. Fortunately, I am surrounded by experts who helped me rectify the situation. Are you?
If you are thinking about moving to the cloud and don’t know where to start, we are happy to have a no obligation chat with you. Contact: info@zoodata.com.au or phone: 9485 0725.