I think my proudest moment as an IT person is not some of the large-scale systems I’ve designed or put into production, or data centers I’ve built out, but when a small business I was consulting for was struck by malware and most of their important data was encrypted for ransom. They thought recovery would take weeks, if it were possible at all.

Thanks to my good backups and planning, I had them up and running just the same again in hours. In many other cases they would’ve been sunk, maybe enough to go out of business.

If you do nothing else, please make sure you have good backups. This is probably the single most important part of being in IT and often the most neglected.