For law firms, which capture and exchange highly sensitive information, data protection has always been vital. Today, however, it’s no longer enough to rely on potentially vulnerable things such as email, USB drives or manual backups. Cybersecurity is on the rise, and law firms – with so much sensitive, highly valuable data - are prime targets. Plus, you need the peace of mind of knowing that if disaster strikes, you need to be able to restore critical information in an instant.
Why security is crucially important
Today, it’s important that firms of all sizes take the necessary steps to protect clients’ intellectual property and other sensitive data. With the ever-increasing threat of security breaches, and the rise of cyber threats, such as ransomware attacks, it’s even more so.
According to The Law Society of NSW, the NSW Police Cybercrime Unit says it receives around seven reports of ransomware scams in NSW every week, and according to the ACCC’s Small Business in Focus report, small businesses suffered at least $1.6 million in losses from ransomware scams in the second half of 2016.1
Recent changes to the Australian Privacy Act regarding mandatory disclosure mean that security is now even more important. You are now required to publicly disclose any instance of your security being compromised – which could have a lasting and serious impact on your firm’s reputation.
For these reasons, you need to be regularly updating your firm’s security and have robust technology in place that provides full redundancy measures and enterprise-grade encryption. You can also engage a trusted partner such as The Missing Link to provide this service, in an outsourced capacity, for you.
Backup
Protecting your business is also future-proofing it. At The Missing Link, we offer a range of backup solutions to meet your needs. This can be either traditional backup or cloud-based, and options include either managed and self-managed backup, or consulting services if you own your own backup system. Our Backup-as-a-Service option, also delivers several architecturally designed, highly scalable, managed or self-managed backup solutions. We ensure continuous incremental data backups so your business processes aren't impacted and it provides near-instant data recovery from any point in the data archive.
Our solution can be tailored to meet your needs - whether your firm is a single office or a large enterprise. We’ve invested heavily in our infrastructure so that multiple copies of your data can be stored at our two data centres, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne. With complete redundancy, you can be assured that we will keep your data safe, secure and accessible, 24/7.
If you’d prefer to own and manage your own backup system, we can also advise you on the best technologies to suit your needs and ensure you’re equipped with an optimised solution to suit your budget and risk mitigation requirements. Our engineers can design the optimal backup system for you to own and self-manage if required.
Disaster Recovery
Did you know that nearly 60% of organisations don’t have a disaster recovery plan in place? Usually, disaster recovery plans are used in the event of a software failure, data breach, power outage or human error. Historically, disaster recovery has been considered complex and time-consuming – however, thanks to the combination of virtualisation and cloud technology, this is no longer the case.
Subscription-based models are becoming increasingly popular as they can provide elastic monthly bills, offering flexibility. There are no or minimal upfront costs and no termination fees. Plus, they have a comparatively low price per instance protected.
If you’re interested in finding out more about disaster recovery options for your law firm, talk to the experts at The Missing Link.
How The Missing Link helped Gilbert and Tobin
Gilbert + Tobin is a leading Australian law firm, with offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. They employ around 500 people and offer industry-leading services.
They engaged The Missing Link to provide a security review and penetration test of their entire environment. This included identifying what the company’s risk and exposure were, and what needed to be done in order to resolve this. Following on from this initial review, The Missing Link, provided Gilbert + Tobin with a future roadmap, and also helped them implement a new wireless network.
The firm now has a much more secure connectivity method for its established hosts. They know who is on what device, and where, and can deliver services to them because they know who they are.
The Missing Link also upgraded and implemented a guest Wi-Fi network which was previously complicated and archaic. Users can now connect to a corporate or guest Wi-Fi network when they are in the office, and the whole process is seamless.
To learn more about security, backup and disaster recovery for law firms, contact The Missing Link.
1 Allman, K, In focus: How to beat hackers without paying a ransom, Law Society of NSW Journal, Issue 28 (Nov 2016)
