In my humble, non-medical opinion, our stomach, lungs and heart, in that order, are the most important parts of the body (putting the brain to one side for a moment!). Why? I hear you ask ...
Next up is to get lots of fresh air into the lungs to keep the blood oxygenated. The purer air we breathe in, the healthier the cells are, and the healthier you are (in general terms) and your heart has 'good' blood to pump around.
Thirdly, our heart can function properly without being clogged up by fatty stuff from too much bad foods and the cleaner the air being pushed up from the lungs, the better performance it gives.
Your server is the heart of your operations. It is where the information is pumped to and from your PCs, laptops and phones, where your workforce gains and submits information on a daily basis.
What surrounds it is the router and firewall protection. If either of these is compromised, there will be one hell of a mess in terms of a hacker gaining access to your servers and demanding money in the form of ransomware.
The internet connection itself is not the issue, that's just the pipe in and out of the building. It's the middle parts that count. Yes, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) also have a duty of care not to allow Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, but businesses and organisations have their own duty of care to ensure that the data held on their equipment is kept safe, and that comes under the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR as we commonly know it.
If you keep the stomach, lungs and heart in order, you are minimising the risk of losing any data from your organisation. There is probably more risk of human error if your systems are as fully protected as possible.
So, on to routers and firewalls. I see routers as the stomach. It's where it is fed the internet connection. The monitoring of the router is vital and ensuring that the basic firewall rules are applied correctly (for smaller companies), minimises the risk of an attack on the server.
Better still (for larger organisations), a properly configured stand-alone firewall system to clean out and block is like good lungs; they pass clean data packets to the server!
Nothing is cheap and a good firewall system can set you back from around £4K upwards, but compared to a potential fine from the Information Commissioner's Office (the ICO) for a data leak, that is very good value to protect your company, business or organisation.
Get your systems checked, get a company-wide penetration test done to produce a report as to where the gaps in your systems are and then get your IT professionals to fill in the holes.
Next week, we'll about talk your data in The Cloud.
If you feel inspired to find out more then do call me on 07555 807700 or leave a comment below and I'll be in touch as soon as I can.