Five tech habits that quietly protect your business
Most business disasters I've helped clean up could have been prevented by five small, boring habits. None of them cost much.
Jason Webb
I've been called out to enough "everything is broken" emergencies to notice a pattern. The same five habits, when missing, turn a small problem into a business-ending one. When present, they quietly prevent disasters you never find out about.
None of them are glamorous. That's the point.
1. Backups that actually get tested
Everyone has backups. Almost nobody tests them. I've watched business owners discover, in the middle of a ransomware incident, that their backup drive has been unplugged for two years or that the cloud sync stopped working last December.
The habit: once a quarter, open a random backup file and check it actually opens. Takes five minutes. Saves your business.
2. Two-factor authentication on anything that touches money
Email, bank, Xero, your payment processor, your domain registrar. If someone gets into any one of these, they can usually chain their way to everything else. Two-factor auth — the app kind, not SMS — blocks 99% of those attacks at the front door.
If you do one thing after reading this, turn it on for your primary email account. Everything else flows from there.
3. A password manager — any password manager
Password1! and Password2! is not a system. A sticky note under the keyboard is not a system. 1Password, Bitwarden, even the built-in one in your browser is better than what most people do.
The trick is you only have to remember one password. The manager handles the rest, and it'll happily generate passwords that would take a supercomputer several centuries to crack.
4. Keep the operating system current
I know, I know — updates are annoying. They restart your machine at the worst moment. But most of the nasty stuff I've seen on client computers was fixed in a security patch six months before the infection happened. The patch was just never installed.
Set updates to install automatically overnight. Walk away. Done.
5. A written "if something breaks" plan
One page. Who do you call? Where are the logins? What's the backup restore process? Who gets notified? Print it, stick it on the wall.
On a good day, this is overkill. On a bad day — when the laptop is dead, the power is out, and your phone is nearly flat — it's the difference between a two-hour problem and a two-week one.
None of this is exciting. That's actually the whole point. Boring, repeatable habits are what separate the businesses that quietly keep running from the ones that end up on the evening news for the wrong reasons.
If you'd like a hand putting any of this in place, get in touch. Happy to come sit down for a coffee and work through it with you.