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A 30-day starter plan

Concrete next steps you can take immediately, whether you have an IT team or not.

This free live online session brought together decision-makers from industries including financial services, legal services, professional services, healthcare, manufacturing, and logistics. The focus was on helping SA business owners, IT managers, and operations leads understand the two fastest-growing risks in their environment — and what to do about both.

Understanding how AI has changed the threat landscape Attendees learned how attackers are now using AI to craft highly personalised phishing emails that reference your company, your CEO, and your real business context — and why staff who have never clicked a phishing link before are now clicking them.

Building a human risk management programme that actually works The session covered how phishing simulation, targeted micro-training, breach scanning, and a culture of safe reporting work together to reduce your most overlooked attack surface — your people.

Applying the 3-2-1-1-0 backup rule to a real SA SME environment Veeam walked through what the gold standard for data protection looks like in practice — three copies of your data, two media types, one offsite, one offline or immutable, and zero errors on last verified restore. Most attendees discovered they were missing at least one of those five.

Understanding why most backups fail when ransomware hits Modern ransomware targets backups first, before encrypting production data. The session showed why an immutable or offline copy is no longer optional — and how automated verification is the only way to know your backup actually works before you need it.

Walking away with a clear 30-day action plan By the end of the session, attendees received a practical two-track 30-day plan — covering human risk and data protection — with concrete steps they could start on Monday morning, regardless of whether they run IT in-house, outsource it, or operate a co-managed model.