With Ransomware and other ugly cybercrimes wreaking havoc in Namibia the past few weeks, it is critically important to understand that you have to have the right security in place to protect your user identities and digital property.  If the worse does happen (because we are just human and the last line of defense can, and does fail) you need to have a backup in place so that you are not at the mercy of the criminals.  

OneDrive is a Cloud Storage Application, where you stores files and folders that are accessible to you from all your devices. It ensures that wherever and whatever you are working form, it's the same file. It removes the need for saving as, emailing attachments, or have multiple versions with multiple people causing wasting of time and double work. It is a Synchronization Service which has the same file on multiple locations. You are able to restore previous versions of files, but if a previous version is restored and changed, the original is lost forever.  

If you do need to restore files from months, or years ago, One Drive is not the solution, and it never proclaimed to be. 

Now with backups, that is a different story. A backup is a is a copy of data (documents, files, etc) taken and stored elsewhere, so that it may be used to restore the original after the loss of a piece of data. The loss could be from criminal activities, maliciousness or purely in error; "oops I deleted it". It is best practice to have daily, weekly and monthly backups, and they should be kept offsite. Having the backup in your safe next to your server room is quite pointless. 

The misconception that One Drive is a backup is very dangerous to your business's continuity. If you want to start mitigating this risk, Salt has managed to secure free trials from both Acronis and Veeam for our customers, should you be interested in testing the backup technologies. These trials are 30 days risk free, and we will help you set them up.  

If you want a quote or a free trial please click here. 

By Vanessa Maresch