Infection by a computer virus can have a catastrophic impact on a business.
Infection by a computer virus can have a catastrophic impact on a business. Staff members can’t access data they rely on for their work and smooth-running systems come to a standstill. Productivity plummets and fire-fighting to maintain good customer relations suddenly take up too much employee time. It can also damage public perception of the business, with websites disrupted and the potential for personal data being leaked.
Managing this type of critical situation can be stressful – especially for an organisation without a dedicated IT department and for employees lacking the necessary IT skills, training and experience. In the haste to recover the situation, they can inadvertently cause additional IT problems, create more security flaws and lose valuable time.
The Cyber Security Breach Survey 2019 (published by the UK’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport) reveals that 13% of businesses took more than 24 hours to recover from their most disruptive security breach – but surprisingly only 16% of businesses surveyed had a formally prepared cyber security incident management process.
It’s always better to prevent an attack by installing and maintaining a centralised antivirus system to protect all the devices on your network. If you’ve done this and also have a well-managed back-up system that has stored copies of your data off site, either at a separate location and/or in the cloud, at least you can recover everything if a virus does manage to get through.
Because new cyber threats are always appearing, no system is failsafe. In the event of an infection succeeding, the preventative measures above will help limit its impact. A centralised antivirus software will scan your network to identify, isolate and neutralise the virus. This can include disconnecting from the internet, quarantining or deleting infected files and removing the virus from your machines. It’s vital that your antivirus software is kept up to date so that it can do this. The antivirus vendor’s website will often provide details of specific threats from an individual virus and what to look out for to minimise damage and complete any necessary system repairs. Once the system has been made safe, data can be restored and your business can get back to work.
The whole process can take a long time if you’ve never done it before and you can save much of this time and have the assurance of knowing your system will be restored to pristine condition by relying on a trusted IT support provider with experience of online security and virus removal.
With the right preventative measures in place and the reassurance of dedicated IT support, your business can operate safely and securely amid the increasing number of cyber threats.
