Protect a Practice

Any hardware or software you have onsite is at risk of crashes, power and Internet interruptions, natural disasters, sabotage, and theft. Whether you rent a software application (like a case management program) or you rent server access (aka hosted servers), the computers you’re accessing are in data centers with Fort Knox security, redundant/backup power, redundant Internet access, and fault tolerance few law firms in the world could afford to build in-house. A Tier IV (highest) rated data center guarantees 99.995% uptime.

Drive Failure

Computer hard drives fail. The machine may be running a mechanical hard drive with spinning plates if you have a desktop computer, an external backup drive, or an older laptop. Newer laptops, smartphones, and tablets have “solid-state” hard drives where data is written to and read from computer chips. Solid-state hard drives have no moving parts, hence the name.

Here are some tools and techniques to keep your client data safe.

Encryption Defined

For purposes of this discussion, encryption can be defined as follows.

“Encryption is the process of converting data to an unrecognizable or ‘encrypted’ form. It is commonly used to protect sensitive information so that only authorized parties can view it. This includes files and storage devices, as well as data transferred over wireless networks and the Internet.

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By Barron K. Henley, Esq. and Jeffrey Schoenberger, Esq.

Don’t Cut Corners Here

Backup is not an area to cut corners on costs, but there are ways to protect yourself and not spend extravagantly.

Backup Device/System Options

We recommend that your primary backup is internet-based, constantly running as a background process on your machines. However, we do NOT recommend relying solely on an Internet backup option. Have a secondary backup system on-site (either external hard drive(s) or network-attached storage (see below)) Here are a few suggestions:

Commonly, users think they have computer protection software running when they really lack it, or it is outdated. While both Windows and macOS have good defenses active out of the box these days, a nice change from prior versions, threats grow unabated.

Online Sync Tools

It seems like everyone has an online sync program these days. If you’re in the Microsoft camp, you have OneDrive. The Google camp has Google Drive. Apple has iCloud Drive. And, Dropbox, the granddaddy of online file sync, is happy to take your money irrespective of your platform choices.

By Jeffrey R. Schoenberger

What Is a Password Manager

A password manager is a program that helps one store, create and organize passwords (and logons and websites, etc.).

Purpose of a Password Manager

The purpose of a password manager is three-fold:

By: Barron K. Henley and Jeffrey R. Schoenberger

What The Experts Say

Here are a couple of quotes to consider:

As an IT Consultant, I often see firms unknowingly putting their business information at risk in small ways. Whether this is due to a lack of awareness of firm security policies or simply a lack of security restrictions, the simple fact is that most firms could do more to protect their data. While implementing a firewall, a spam filter, and a password policy is a great start, much more is needed in the way of education, awareness and workflow to completely protect a business from today’s evolving threats.

This is also known as 2FA or multi factor authentication

What Is Two Factor Authentication?

Here’s a good definition.

“Two-factor authentication (2FA), sometimes referred to as two-step verification or dual-factor authentication, is a security process in which users provide two different authentication factors to verify themselves.”¹