At least two of our customers that are hosting the software on their own servers (on-premises) have been hit by ransomware in recent weeks. Briefly, this is malware that encrypts the data on your hard drive (or server hard drive), and you are then asked to pay a ransom to obtain the key to unencrypt your data. The reality is, if you get hit by ransomware, you're either paying them money (a very bad idea, obviously) or formatting your drive, and recovering your data from the most recent backup.
At which point many victims say, "Oops! Backup? Hmmm..."
It continues to amaze me that so many businesses still, in this day and age, get caught without usable recent backups of their key business data. They'll spend all kinds of money, time and attention choosing ERP Software to run their business, but pay no attention to securing the key business data the system relies on.
One of the affected customers had not performed a backup since 2010. And I'm told by many others in the industry that this is still quite common.
This is perhaps yet another compelling reason for smaller businesses, those without IT people on staff, to move to hosted software-as-a-service solutions, and take both the threat of cyber-attacks, and the risk of having no usable data backups, substantially out of the picture.
