This article is a quick review of the technologies and solutions currently available that will help to keep your office computers and critical business data from being lost due to a computer failure or a malicious attack from the internet.

The Internet:

We all love to us use email, browse the web and do research on subjects of interest to us for both business and pleasure. As many of you know first hand, viruses and other malicious programs exist on the internet. To prevent these and to protect your customers make yourself a promise this fall to get one of each type of the following programs;

Self-Updating virus checker

Both Norton (http://www.symantec.com/nav/nav_9xnt/) and McAfee (http://download.mcafee.com/us/) offer products that will upgrade by themselves as long as your computer is regularly on and connected to the Internet. In many cases, your computer came with one of these products on a trial basis and many people let those trials lapse. Do yourself a favor and get good virus protection to protect you and your customers from viruses.

Self-Updating spyware/adware remover

The new programs that are out there that have the potential to harm your computer are adware and spyware. They use up Computer Memory, Hard Disk space, and send personal information about your computer and possibly you personally out to the internet. Go ahead and purchase AdAware (http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/) or BPS Spyware/Adware Remover (http://www.bulletproofsoft.com/index.html) to protect you from these new intrusions.

Firewalls

One of the most annoying things going happening on the Internet today are hackers trying to get into your computer to either use it for some purpose or to harm your computer because it is there. Buy a firewall today. You can either get a hardware device such as a Cable/DSL Router from Linksys or NetGear or get a software solution such as an Internet Security package from Norton or McAfee that include a software firewall solution. I prefer the hardware solution because after setup it requires less maintenance, but get one or the other to protect your computer and data.

The Local Network and Backups:

What else could be more important than protecting your existing data? Nothing. This is your sales data, your email, and your accounting data. The market has been working overtime in the last few years and I wanted to briefly talk about 3 solutions available to you;

Manual Backup

Almost all new or reasonably new computers have a writeable CD drive in them. Use this CD drive to make copies of your important data including MS Word/Excel Documents & Email.

Online Backup

If you don't have a lot of data or you are just interested in backing up a small to medium size set of data, Connected.com (http://www.connected.com/) has a solution for you. They have a service that will automatically and securely back up the data from your computer to the internet so that if your computer fails, you can just connect to their site and restore your data.

Local Automatic Backup

A new company on the market, Ispiri (http://www.ispiri.com/), has created an innovative product called Mirra to allow automated local backups without interaction from you. If you unplug your laptop or turn off your computer, it automatically waits until it is available again to continue backing up. The plus to this setup is that it does not overly tax your internet connection and it also has some additional bonuses including a service that allows you to view or restore the data you backed up from anywhere on the internet.

One of these solutions should be just the thing for you. Take the time this fall to look around at the virus/adware and backup solutions suggested here to protect your data and your business from problems caused by the loss or corruption of your business data.