ACME is a company known to me but who wishes to remain nameless. Family owned; they distribute electrical components. With offices in the UK, Central and Eastern Europe, the business made great use of their Navision system. This system supported all their offices – and was hosted “on premise” in their offices in the UK.
One day ACME found their Navision system unresponsive. Hours later they received a ransom demand – requiring them to pay several hundred thousand pounds in exchange for access to their financial data. ACME wiped their server – rebuilt it – installed their last backup. No go. The last backup also included the Malware. They kept going back to earlier versions – but every backup had the same problem. After three days of not trading - the Owners had a decision to make – pay the ransom – or build a new system. They refused to do the former – so embarked on the latter. They started the fastest Business Central deployment I’ve ever seen. At the same time, they embarked upon a big upgrade of their somewhat dated infrastructure. They moved everything to the cloud.
Whilst ACME’s response to being hacked was exceptional – their predicament is not. Hacking is now a fact of life. It is no longer a question of if hackers will have a go – but whether they will be successful in compromising your business.
CFOs are blessed with two key responsibilities in this regard:
- To ensure that their business systems are secured to the greatest practical extent. If you make it difficult for Hackers to get access – they will move on and look for easier pickings elsewhere.
- To ensure that if/when a hack is successful – their business will be able to continue trading – with a minimum of disruption.
ACME did a remarkable job – their customers and suppliers rallied around to help - but it still took them 4 weeks to print another invoice, 6 weeks to reconcile cash and something like £400k in investment. It was six months before they got to a new business as usual – but the business was saved.
If hackers presented you and your business with the same challenge – would the same be true?
How Can TSG Help?
If you want to confirm that you’ve taken all the appropriate steps – we can independently assess your cyber preparedness against industry standards. We can also help you make sense of industry regulations and how these may affect you.
If you want to get your ERP system out of harm’s way – or at least somewhere safer than on premise – we can migrate your system to private or public cloud.
If you can’t contemplate any downtime – we can maintain a second system for you – on hot standby – an exact replica of your set up, a near real-time copy of your data – completely independent of your network.
