The City of Newport Business Club hosted its first business lunch of 2014 on Tuesday 18th March at the Holiday Inn, Newport. The guest speakers covered the topic, ‘How safe is your data?’, a key consideration for all businesses who store and use electronic data.
Az Ashraf, founder of A2Z Computing took to the stage first and give a detailed insight into the 31 different kinds of viruses that are currently travelling around the worldwide web. If you wanted to know the difference between a wabbit and a botnet, then this was definitely for you and certainly made you think twice about opening any unexpected email that arrives in your inbox! Fortunately, Az then went on to provide some simple tips to help protect against becoming a computer virus victim.
Claire Brown from Spectrum Internet then took over and posed 5 key questions: What do you do with your data? How do you store your date? How do you access your data? When do you check it? Why do you need to secure it?
She then asked each of us to imagine ourselves as computer hackers, and we quickly identified that the room was full of possible targets! Claire interspersed her talk with facts and figures to reinforce her key points and then presented some basic guidelines to help reduce the risk of becoming a victim of hacking – one of which was avoiding obvious passwords linked to your hobbies and interests.
Both speakers provided food for thought, especially to those responsible for ensuring the security of commercially sensitive data in a business setting. The next City of Newport Business Club event is “It’s Murder in Business” – a murder mystery whodunit evening which takes place at 5.30 p.m. on Thursday 15th May 2014 at the Holiday Inn, Newport and is open to all business people. Cost is £35 per person. Please book via [email protected]