It's fantastic how, over the years, lots of businesses have come up with software to make your life easier when dealing with them.  Banks are a prime example offering software to allow you to carry out most day to day transactions with out having to leave the office or stand in a queue.  They may even come out and install it for you at little or no charge. 

And then you start using this software, and it becomes part of the standard business day - as commonplace as Email.   This is where the danger starts to creep in.  Practises that were at first strictly adhered to now begin to be dropped.  Staff may come and go, and overtime, some knowledge is lost.  It's at this point critical software backups stop being made, or if they are, it might not be the correct manner.

Many of these third party programs are written and installed by people who are more focussed on their needs than yours.  Often they use databases which act in such a way that standard backup applications can not access them.  So the user initiated backup process becomes the only means of recovering data.  Many are installed only on a single PC on the network and typically PC’s are not backed up.  Because the third party people came in and installed it for you, your IT support may not even know that the application is there, that is not protected or that it is a vital part of your business.

Just last week we saw a client who lost all their banking data because no one had run the banking backup tool for 6 months.  A couple of months ago, I saw another client being presented with a $2K bill for the install of an application and repair of its data.  That application existed only on a PC and ran in the back ground, their IT team had no idea it was there till the hard drive died in the PC.

If you run banking or payroll software, I strongly suggest that you have the PCs regularly scanned for malicious software.  And I recommend that users are asked to demonstrate what backup procedures they are following.  If you have any software that is “only” installed on one PC, then it should be checked out.  Most importantly no one should every think that because it was OK six months ago it still is.  If it’s worth checking it out now its worth doing it again in six months.  We are all only human and we all forget.