This act mandates that all owners and importers of goods must retain records for 5 years and be able to produce records as required. Penalties apply should you not comply.
Are your records protected and archived for 5 years?
If you are not absolutely certain you must read on.
How to protect your records:
- Ensure that you have professional Anti-virus that is up to date
- Ensure that you have professional Web Protection
- Back up all of your files both on-site and to a cloud backup. This must be monitored to ensure that the backups are working as they should.
- Make sure your computer operating system is up to date and has the latest security patches installed.
- For extra protection or if you are a medium to large businesses you should also consider:
- Proper Gateway Firewalls
- Cloud based mail filtering
- Proper user permission management
- Staff education programs.
What are your risks of losing files / data?
From my experience, most files/data are lost through accidental deletion or deliberate deletion by a disgruntled employee. The second most common cause is hardware failures.
Other common causes include:
- Power surges
- Accidental data corruption
- Acts of god. Floods etc.
- Fire
- Burglary / Theft of equipment
- Encryption / Ransom-Ware viruses like the latest “WanaCry” attack
- Other Viruses
Ransom-Ware is on the rise and becoming a more serious risk by the day. The latest “WanaCry” attack affected more than 200,000 computers in the first 3 days.
If you are not taking your security and backups seriously, it is only a matter of time before you will probably get affected.
Where to from here?
Talk to your IT provider and get them to prove to you that your data is safe. If they cannot do so, we recommend to talk to the guys at Plan A IT www.plana.com.au
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