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What is an air gap? | LMS Group

There is no doubt cyber attacks are growing, with four in 10 businesses reporting breaches or attacks in the last 12 months. If you’ve been learning about the best ways to keep your business secure from cybercriminals, you may have heard of the phrase ‘air gap’. But, do you know what an air gap is?

Put simply, an air gap is the act of isolating a device (computer/laptop/USB) from the network or internet. As soon as the device is connected to things such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, they are no longer air gaped, meaning they can be compromised by cybercriminals.

The benefits of an air gap is that it can help you to rapidly recover from a cyber attack. If your business-critical data is backed up on a hard drive that is air gapped, you can use the hard drive to get back up and running, minimising downtime. Whilst it is labour intensive to access, it will take less time than having to try and recover from a ransomware attack.

The con of air gapping

In terms of cons, an air gapped device is labour intensive to access. If you have to go offsite to upload and download data, you will be sacrificing speed for security. But, bear in mind, if travelling offsite, you really need to trust the individual who is doing this. Are they likely to leave it on the bus or try to open it at home? If either of these things happen, your security is automatically compromised.

What do I need to air gap my backups?

If you air gap as part of your cyber security strategy, you need to make sure either your offsite back up of physical media isn’t accessible via the internet or has its own network capability.

You’ll also need disaster recovery software that can backup to multiple types of media, and also help you implement a 3-2-1 strategy; three copies of data, stored in two separate locations and one at an offsite location.

How can I get started?

At LMS Group, we are experts in cyber security. This means we can provide you with a free cyber security audit, giving you recommendations on how you can secure your business and it’s data from cybercriminals.

If you’d like to know more about what our cyber security audit entails, please get in touch using the form below and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

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