Scary Data Stories To Tell In The Dark

At Summit Hosting, we’ve heard some pretty scary stories from Sage and QuickBooks users who came to us to help rescue them from their security and data nightmares. Below, find a few of the most common monsters we’ve been able to assist in fending off for our customers by sharing our expert knowledge, using top-tier sophisticated technology and providing the best dedicated cloud hosting services in North America.

(Psssst... Feel free to print off these frightening tales, grab a flashlight and read them at your next Halloween party.)

Password Poltergeists

According to a consumer account security report, 73% of online accounts are guarded by duplicated passwords. All it takes is for a hacker to get their hands on your users’ password for one account, and they potentially have access to all accounts. Scary!

Encourage your employees to use strong passwords and ones that are unique to your environment.

You can also protect yourself from these invaders by adding an extra layer of security in the form of multi-factor authentication. Even if one of them gets their hands on the right password, they’ll still need to pass a second step of authentication to cross into your realm.

Undead Upgrade

Do you have Zombie notifications reminding you to update your operating system or other programs? Those notifications never die! But ignore them at your peril. Publishers like Microsoft identify security threats and release updates to patch these holes. If you don’t keep your operating system up to date, you risk needlessly exposing yourself to all kinds of things that will be hard to kill.

Malware Mummies

Wrapped up in things like email and websites, malware can be cloaked in seemingly legitimate places. Once they’re unleashed in your environment, they can invade, damage, and disable your systems. New types are unearthed regularly, and your best protection against these is making sure you have powerful antivirus software that is regularly updated.

Alien Attackers

There are some countries where a high number of cyber threats are known to originate. Chances are these aren’t countries you do business in, so a strategy like country blocking which blocks access to your servers from these countries can keep these unwanted visitors from abducting your data.

Spooky Spoofers

These creeps hijack legitimate users’ email accounts, posing as trusted contacts in order to gain access to email recipients. While sometimes they’re just sending spam, other spoofing attacks are more sinister, often trying to gain access to sensitive information such as passwords and credit card numbers. Or they send links that contain the aforementioned Malware Mummies. Be wary of anything suspicious and always verify sender details before clicking on links/attachments!

Natural Disaster Deities

According to FEMA, “Following a disaster, 90% of smaller companies fail within a year unless they can resume operations within 5 days”. Frightening!

If your business finds itself in the path of a fire, storm, or other natural disasters, you may find yourself losing sleep over whether your network equipment will become inaccessible, damaged, or even destroyed. Knowing that your data is hosted in a secure, intrusion-monitored data center can help you sleep at night.

Backup Boogiemen

We’ve heard some of the scariest horror stories around this one. If your server goes out of commission, you may run into one of these all too common scenarios:

• You weren’t backing up all necessary files, so some of your data is unrecoverable.
• You don’t have a recent enough backup, so you have to try to recreate all work performed since the latest you have.
• You were storing the backup in the same location as the server (or worse yet, on the same server you’re backing up), so if there was a damaging event, the backup was also incapacitated.

Having a daily backups retained off-site for 15 days can keep these boogiemen at bay.

What Else Can I Do To Help Keep My Nightmares At Bay?

Aside from working with a dedicated hosting provider, there are also things you can do to help scare those monsters away - after all, total data security is a team effort between your financial software users, administrators and hosting provider. Discover 7 ways you can help protect your data here.

Don’t Worry - You’re Safe With Us

Our specialized, secure cloud hosting services are designed to give you peace-of-mind so you can rest easy knowing your data is protected from things that go bump in the night. If you’re ready to migrate your data into the cloud, or you’d like to learn more about our QuickBooks and Sage hosting services on dedicated servers – contact us today! Our knights in shining armor *cough cloud hosting specialists cough* at Summit Hosting are just a phone call or a few clicks away: 888-244-6559.