Ransomware is one
of the fastest growing cyber-crimes in the world

Last year, 37% of businesses
were victim to an attack.

In case you didn’t
know, a ransomware attack is where cyber criminals infiltrate your network (or
device) and steal your data by encrypting it. The data is still there, but you
can’t access it.

Then they demand
you pay a large ransom fee for the encryption key.

If you don’t pay
the demand (which can be tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds), they
delete your data.

It’s not just the
cost of the ransom fee to worry about. There’s the stress, reputational damage
and downtime that goes with it. In 2021, the average downtime suffered after a
ransomware attack was 22 days.

Official advice is
not to pay any ransomware demands.

However, a new
survey has shown that a massive 97% of business leaders who’ve experienced a
ransomware attack in the past would pay up quickly if they were attacked again

A third of them
would pay instantly.

What does that tell
you about what a nightmare the whole thing is for any business?

The other problem
is, when you pay a ransomware demand, it’s not guaranteed that you’ll get your
data back. On average, only 65% of data is restored once a fee is paid.

You may face
further extortion. And by letting cyber criminals know that your business pays
ransom fees, it’s likely that you’ll face subsequent attacks in the future.

So what’s the best
way to deal with ransomware?

First, you should
put in place the right security measures to try to prevent an attack:

·        
Educate your people on cyber security
and best practice

·        
Implement multi-factor authorisation
across all your applications

·        
Use a password manager

·        
Make sure all updates are installed quickly

·        
And you should always have a working
backup in place – ideally one where older data is retained and cannot be changed

It’s also a great
idea to have a response and recovery plan that details what you will do in the
event of a ransomware attack.

Not only will it
mean your business can respond faster, but it should reduce the amount of
downtime suffered as you’ve already considered exactly what needs to happen.

This is what we do.
We help businesses increase their cyber security to reduce their chances of
being affected. Let’s talk.

Watch our weekly tech update video for more WEEKLY TECH UPDATE VIDEO

Focus more, be interrupted less… and get stuff done

When you’re a business owner or manager, you have a lot of
responsibilities. There are also many people who want to speak to you throughout your working day.

Unfortunately, that means that you may be interrupted more
often than you’d like. And you have to split your focus on things you’d rather give your full
attention to.

It can be a big frustration.

Many business owners and managers feel this way. You are not alone!

Download our latest business guide here! 

The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to a sharp rise in cyber-attacks.

And while many of the attacks are between these two countries, there is very real potential for
other countries to fall victim to cyber-attacks by Russia, thanks to the
sanctions placed upon it.

Over in the US, President Joe Biden declared the government had been improving national cyber security defences for some time now.

They’re focusing on the infrastructure to make sure that water, electricity and oil pipeline
services aren’t at increased risk of attack.

Some very sensible cyber security advice has also been issued. There are a series of actions that
businesses should be taking immediately to protect themselves against
cyber-attacks, and other data security risks.

To start with look at implementing multi-factor authentication. This is where you generate a login code on another device, to prove it’s really you logging in.

Data backups should also be checked on a regular basis. Ideally there should be a copy of data that cannot be changed during a cyber-attack.

All data should also be encrypted, meaning it would have no value and be unusable if anyone did manage to access it.

It’s also a good idea to have an emergency plan ready to go that will help mitigate any attack
quickly and effectively.

Businesses are also being advised to give their staff training to help them spot and avoid the
common tactics used by cyber criminals.

These include phishing attacks where they send an email pretending to be someone else. And spoof login web pages, where they hope you will enter real login details in error.

If you have an IT support partner already, speak with them to make sure all of your systems are fully up-to-date and patched as necessary.

They can also help you to audit how well you’re performing with the items above, and get a plan in place to help you respond to an attack or attempted attack.

If you don’t have an IT support partner – or you feel your current one isn’t able to help you
with your data security, we can help. Call us.

Here are some ideas on what will be driving the data analytics and BI conversation in 2022 and beyond: Top Five BI, Data and Analytics Predictions for 2022 | bipp Analytics (see the article for more details on each of the following items.

1) The Data-Driven Company is Dead – Long Live the Culture of Analytics

True benefits of analytics and BI come from a cultural change. Give people access to tools on their terms by embedding dashboards in the intranets or apps they know. Create trust by ensuring everyone uses the same language to represent critical KPIs and clean data. And combine hands-on training with a platform that can scale your business, recognizing the cultural shift required to take enterprise-wide advantage of BI.

2) Data Modeling Layers Bring Self-Service (BI) Power to the People

Self-service business users can make decisions based on the same trusted logic as the same language represents critical KPIs. For example, they can create dashboards, trust their visualizations and easily filter them in real-time. Which means they’re making decisions based on the latest, real-time information.

3) The Ayes (Eyes!) Have IT

In an age of no-code/low-code, self-service tech, we’d better embrace the vision-first world of BI. Also, we need visual SQL tools that let blend data and create charts from disparate sources without going through an ETL pipeline. Using an intuitive, flexible drag-and-drop interface.

4) The Revolution Will be Augmented

The augmented analysis takes critical business metrics and lets the platform explore millions of combinations, determine the highest impact, reveal these as facts, and prioritize them in order of importance. All without needing to understand a query language, such as SQL.

5) The Year of the Data Engineer

Data engineers have to bolt and chain tools together with code as they strive to simplify the data stack. The data engineering skillset is ideal for a business-critical technical problem. Every business must enable teams with the best tooling while maintaining a unified, flexible data layer. Engineers will need to architect and operate data stacks that solve these problems and be responsible for machine learning, analytic reporting, and decision management.

Anomaly detection is one of the most interesting applications in machine learning.

We wrote this article with our 5 predictions for the modern data stack in 2022.