Cyber Essentials and backups
When it comes to the Cyber Essentials scheme, there’s no hard and fast rules when it comes to backing up data. Yes the Cyber Essentials scheme concentrates around the five technical controls on securing your machines, but backing up your information can also play a big part of this and should be best practice within your business.
The current version of the Cyber Essentials Requirements for IT infrastructure document (version 3.0), from NCSC only briefly touches on backups. This can be found on the back page of the guide and is only mentioned as an advisory as businesses should perform these.
The requirement document mentions that you should look to backup data and save it to another device or within an cloud storage location, such as Dropbox, Amazon AWS, Azure Storage and so forth.
NCSC also mentions that you should look to enable backups within your Operating System, as this will help you recover your information should anything bad happen, and this doesn’t have to rely upon you remembering to backup. You can find information on how to backup Microsoft Windows here https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/backup-and-restore-in-windows-352091d2-bb9d-3ea3-ed18-52ef2b88cbef and macOS here https://support.apple.com/mac-backup.
If you are using cloud-based services, for your email (such as Microsoft 365 or Google workspace), or you use cloud for your CRM, finance systems and such, you should also check to see what is being backed up and more importantly how you can recover should you need to. Did you know that Microsoft doesn’t backup your Microsoft 365 data? So, if they had a serious incident you may lose all your information. Would your business survive this? Time to put some controls in place if this is needed.
Backing up information, is as important as ever these days as it can help safeguard against ransomware, malicious attacks and many other issues such as hardware failures, having the piece of mind knowing your data is safe is good for business and your nerves.
So if you’re not backing up all your data, then start today. If you haven’t tested your backups, start today and make sure everything is backed up and you can recover when the time comes.
