Chris Allen

Data protection for a small business owner is not a one-off project. It is a handful of habits, layered together, that quietly reduce your risk. Here are the tips that pay back the most for the time they take.

Tip 1: Treat your laptop as the weakest link

For most small business owners, the laptop is the single most valuable asset and the easiest to lose. Full disk encryption (BitLocker on Windows, FileVault on macOS) is free and on by default on modern devices, but worth checking. A lost or stolen laptop with encryption on is an annoying replacement cost. Without it, it is a data breach.

Tip 2: Use a password manager, not your browser’s password store

Browser password stores are convenient but easier to compromise. A dedicated password manager (1Password, Bitwarden, KeePass) makes unique strong passwords genuinely usable and is the single biggest reduction in account takeover risk you can buy for £5 a month.

Tip 3: Turn on multi-factor authentication everywhere

Email, banking, accounting software, cloud storage, business social accounts. Authenticator app or hardware key, not SMS. If an account has anything worth protecting, MFA goes on it.

Tip 4: Patch within two weeks

Operating system, browser, accounting software, any line-of-business app. Set automatic updates where the vendor offers them. Ransomware almost always enters through unpatched software, not zero-days.

Tip 5: Add an offsite backup

If your business data lives on one device, or on one server, or in one cloud service, you have a single point of failure. Local backup helps with drive failure. Offsite backup is what you need for fire, flood, theft, ransomware, or accidental deletion. Our UK Cloud Backup starts at £14 per TB per month, billed in 0.5 TB increments, hosted in our ISO 27001 Sheffield data centre.

Tip 6: Back up Microsoft 365 separately

Microsoft does not protect you against deletion (accidental or malicious), ransomware syncing through OneDrive, or a leaver wiping their own mailbox. A third-party backup of Microsoft 365 catches all of these. We can fold it into our Managed Backup Services if you want it managed end-to-end.

Tip 7: Know your UK GDPR obligations

If you hold personal data on UK residents, GDPR applies. Document what you collect, why, how long you keep it, and who you share it with. The ICO has small business guidance specifically. Breach notification within 72 hours is the rule you do not want to be caught out on.

Tip 8: Test your restore once a quarter

A backup you have not tested is not a backup. Set a calendar reminder to restore one file or one folder from your backup every three months. If it works, great. If it does not, you have found a problem at a quiet moment instead of during a crisis.

Tip 9: Write down what happens if you get hit

Three pages of plain text covering: who notices, who you call, what you tell customers, how you isolate, how you restore. Print it. Add your insurance broker, your IT supplier, the ICO breach reporting URL, and the Action Fraud number. The middle of an incident is the worst time to draft this.

Tip 10: Make security boring

The best security setup is one your future self does not have to think about. Automatic patching, automatic backups, MFA enrolled on every account once. Boring is good. Constant manual intervention is how habits slip.

Where HA Hosting fits

Tip 5 and Tip 6 above are the controls we cover end-to-end. Managed Backup Services for businesses that want the offsite backup running without them touching it. UK Cloud Backup for businesses that want the storage and will run the backup tool themselves. Both UK-resident, UK-managed, in our ISO 27001 Sheffield data centre.

Always Looking to Improve

In our last blog post, we mentioned encouraging our team members to pursue training to help develop their skills – benefiting both them as an individual and HA Hosting as a business (and hopefully a knock-on effect to our customers).

Carrying on from that we wanted to highlight some of the training one of our Tech Team, Marc, has completed recently.

 

Developing as a Network Specialist

Marc’s training was centered around developing as a Network Security Specialist. A course that Marc originally found during lockdown last year. Obviously we thought it was a good idea considering the nature of what we do here at HA Hosting. Nice find Marc!

The course basically consisted of network security content. Ranging from firewall configuration to the appropriate standards that surround network security.

 

“It was a self-paced course, so ultimately went as well as it did. Didn’t really do much of it at work; most was done at home in my spare time. The rate was about a module a week, not including time spent not doing it!”

 

How This Will Help in the Future

With its focus on network security, it’ll help by allowing Marc to look at things like our firewall config with a wider vision. So instead of “what can we do to get this working now”, he can look at it from “what can we do to get it working now, and keep it secure without needing to come back to it in the future?”. Obviously, this is a very useful skill to have for the long-term health of HA’s infrastructure and means Marc can discuss problems and solutions with the Tech Team at a higher level than before.

“Alongside this, I’ll be able to bring other aspects that I’ve learned into my day-to-day work.”

Always Trying to Improve

One thing we always try to do here at HA Hosting is to keep improving in all aspects that we can.

This could be technology, processes, skills, etc. Included in this is Staff training – and not just in learning more IT-Based skills. We try and help develop our Team in various aspects so that they can achieve their own personal goals.

 

Blake’s Recent Training

A recent example of that is with some training that Blake did in Team Leading & some other areas of general business.

“I felt it went well, I had to do things I’ve never done before giving me a new insight.

It helped me to pinpoint areas where we can improve as a business or introduce things we don’t currently have in place.
I gained new knowledge in businesses and how they operate as well as gaining leadership skills I didn’t have previously.

It’s also helped me to boost my confidence and learn how to better word things to ensure everyone has an understanding.”

 

Developing for the Future

Not only has this training helped Blake as an individual to develop, but also through his new skills and understanding, will help to push and improve aspects of HA Hosting in the future.

The obvious impact you will see from this, from a client perspective, is a slow increase in the levels of service quality and professionalism across the business – especially as we encourage more of our Team to keep learning and developing!

 

Good job completing the training, Blake!

Veeam Cloud Connect – What Is It?

In our last blog post, we spoke about how HA Hosting is partnering up with Veeam. And how this would let us provide more and better backup solutions for you to use. As stated in that blog post, we’re now talking about Veeam Cloud Connect.

 

What is Veeam Cloud Connect?

Veeam Cloud Connect is a solution that makes it easy to get backups and replicas off-site to a Backup as a Service (BaaS) or Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) provider without the cost and complexity of managing a second infrastructure.

Basically, if you have an existing Veeam backup, Cloud Connect allows you to “link” that to our Data Centre easily. From here you can use the off-site replica to backup and restore from as normal.

It’s as easy as selecting a service provider from our global network of partners and pointing backup or replica jobs to the cloud with a few simple clicks. There’s no separate console, and data is fully encrypted at every step. Backups are as safe and confidential as they would be in a dedicated off-site repository so that data of ALL types are completely protected and easy to recover.

 

Why Use Veeam Cloud Connect?

If you’re familiar with the 3-2-1 rule for data security you probably know why off-site backup is so key.

For those who aren’t here is a quick summary:

• 3 – Have 3 copies of your data (Live data, a local copy & an off-site copy)
• 2 – Store your data on 2 different types of media (e.g. an external and internal hard drive)
• 1 – 1 copy of your data needs to be stored off-site for extra added protection

This ‘rule’ is basically a standard within the IT world to ensure Data security. Cloud Connect works within this because it lets you have off-site backup easily. So using Cloud Connect makes following this 3-2-1 practice easy, thanks to how their systems integrate your existing backup to an off-site location.

Once you have Cloud Connect set up, you would ideally:

• Use a local backup copy to restore from quickly
• Use your off-site backup copy to restore from when the local copy is compromised

Using both of these allows you to keep hitting your RTO/RPO goals.

 

If you want to find out more about Veeam Cloud Connect, you can visit our webpage or Veeam’s own page.

If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with us.

We’re Partnering Up with Veeam

 

If you read our last blog post about the new types of backup services we’re developing this will be less of a surprise.

For those who haven’t read that blog, we encourage reading before this. This will make a lot more sense after.

But to cut a long story short; we’re becoming a Veeam Partner and will be offering some of their services.

 

Who is Veeam?

To use their own words: “Veeam is the leader in backup solutions that deliver Cloud Data Management“.

They are known for making backup easy and accessible. They provide a single platform for backup, accelerating hybrid cloud and securing data. This platform can be used with pretty much any backup storage you may already have too.

You may be thinking “if they’re so great, why wouldn’t we just buy backup from them?”. There is a simple answer.

They sell to direct customers. They prefer to work with IT companies. What they do is provide the platform and the resources for Resellers, who can then go on to help their own customers.

 

Veeam & HA Hosting

As we said earlier, we are partnering up with Veeam via their partner program. Put simply, this gives us the ability to resell their services and use their resources.

As a result of this, it means we can offer a robust and intuitive portal to interact with your backups but also use the storage we have at the Sheffield Data Centre.

For now, the first backup services we will be releasing is Veeam Cloud Connect. This allows you to connect any existing Veeam Backup you may have to our storage. We’ll have more on Veeam Cloud Connect in our next blog.

 

What Can You Expect

In the near future, you can expect to see Veeam Cloud Connect as a ready to use service. Beyond that, possibly more as time goes on.

This partnership means we’ll have support and resources we didn’t previously. Meaning we should be able to keep improving our backup services to make sure you have a great experience, should you ever decide to trust us with backing up and protecting your business.