Plenty of IT support firms tell you they monitor hundreds of things on your network and can present a huge 500 page report “proving” they are doing their job.   While many things are important to monitor, there are a few we see constantly ignored by an IT staff.  Save yourself a lot of trouble by checking these three things and make sure you are protected.

Data Backup / Business Continuity
Check your backup reports every day.  Make sure they show no failures, but more importantly check the logs at least once a week to verify critical items are being backed up.   We’ve seen plenty of clients add a new volume of documents on a  private folder for the CEO/CFO to share them for a new project, but they forgot to add it to the backup rotation.   Someone deletes a file accidentally and it can take days to renter the data.

Log Monitoring
You should be checking firewall, switch, server and several other logs for unknown or problematic activity.  It a pain to be sure, but what’s worse would be to ignore something and then find out a failure or weak point could have been prevented.  We’ve seen servers run out of drive space that were sending warnings for weeks and firewall logs showing an attack penetration days before clients lost access to their data.  Most importantly, if you are subject to government compliance’s.  Are you sure your are meeting all of the legal requirements?

Windows patching and Anti-Virus
Do you have systematic processes in place to notify you if Windows security patches are installed?  What about your anti-virus engine?  Is the scanner database current on all connected devices?  It only takes one infected machine to cripple a network and cause data loss to happen or worse, a data breach.

There are a few more items that are critical to watch and if you’d like to know more, feel free to contact us.