FIRST WORD
This is the last week of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and this year’s campaign closes with the step that’s easiest to put off: recover.
Prevention gets the attention. But sooner or later, something gets through, a laptop dies, or someone deletes the wrong folder. What matters then is how quickly you’re back to work, and who’s making that happen.
Last month we found a client’s backups quietly failing because of leftovers from their previous IT provider, and we’d much rather find that on a Tuesday night than on the day they need a restore.
A Green Backup Report Isn’t A Recovery Plan
Why it matters: A “backup successful” message tells you a copy was made. It doesn’t tell you whether that copy works, or how long it would take to get your business running from it.
The case to know: In 1998, someone at Pixar accidentally ran a delete command on the Toy Story 2 files and wiped out most of the film. When the team went to restore it, they found the backup system had been failing without anyone noticing. The movie survived only because a technical director had a copy on her home computer.
What CISA says: This year’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month centers on three steps: Reduce, Replace, and Recover. CISA aims them mainly at critical infrastructure, but the third applies to any business: be able to recover quickly when an attack gets through.
The catch: A backup can report success every night and still fail you. The real question isn’t whether you have backups. It’s how long you’d be closed while restoring them.
What we do: Every two weeks, we spin up our clients’ backups in a separate virtual environment, test the services, confirm we can log in, and verify that everything works. We call it auto-verification. It’s the difference between “the backup ran” and “the backup works.”
What we recommend:
Set a recovery-time target. Decide how long you could be down before it seriously hurts the business. An hour? A day? That number should drive your backup setup.
Test real restores on a schedule. We recommend a partial restore monthly and a full restore quarterly. Only a test that restores real files proves a backup works.
Keep one copy out of reach. At least one copy should be offline or unchangeable (immutable), so ransomware can’t encrypt or delete it along with everything else.
Not sure where you stand? Ask us for a restore test, and we’ll show you how long it would actually take to get back to work.
The bottom line: Measure your backups in hours to recover, not in checkmarks.
DO THIS WEEK
Find Out Where Your Work Actually Lives
Pixar’s film survived because of a copy nobody planned for. Make sure your important files aren’t in places nobody planned for either. Take 15 minutes this week:
List where your team actually saves work: the server, SharePoint or OneDrive, laptop desktops, email attachments, USB drives.
Ask whether each of those places is backed up.
Move anything important out of the places that aren’t.
Office Apps On Windows 10 Stopped Getting New Features (October 2026)
What’s happening: Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are frozen at their current version on Windows 10. For businesses on Microsoft’s Monthly Enterprise update schedule, new features stopped on October 13. Semi-Annual Enterprise customers follow on January 12, 2027. Security updates continue until October 10, 2028.
The trap: Assuming that because the apps still work, you don’t need to do anything. Microsoft warns that running its apps on an unsupported operating system can cause performance and reliability problems.
The business takeaway: Count your Windows 10 machines now. October 2028 is the hard stop for Office security updates, and replacing devices takes planning.
Know Who Handles Your Recovery
Ask whoever manages your backups three questions this week:
When was our last full restore test, and did it work?
How long would it take to get us running again after a major outage?
Who restores it if our IT person is out sick, on vacation, or it’s 2 a.m.?
Who it’s for: Owners and anyone responsible for keeping the business running.
If one person handles most of your IT, our breakdown of in-house IT costs covers the gaps left by vacations, sick days, turnover, and after-hours problems.
Button: Read: In-House IT Overhead
October 27, 1980: The Internet’s Ancestor Goes Dark
On this date, ARPANET, the Defense Department research network that grew into today’s internet, became unusable for about four hours. A failure in one piece of equipment, combined with a flaw in how the network cleared out old messages, caused the network to choke on its own traffic.
The twist: Afterward, the engineers published a detailed write-up of exactly what went wrong so others could learn from it. Recovery isn’t finished until you know why it broke.