Crazy Domains, Dropsuite to provide website backup solution for SMEs

Australian domain provider Crazy Domains will be rolling out Dropsuite's website backup solution to its 1.5 million small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) customers across the Asia-Pacific, Middle Eastern, and European regions, thanks to a new partnership announced on Tuesday.

According to Dropsuite CEO Charif El-Ansari, 30,000 websites are hacked daily, and 62 percent of SMEs do not routinely back up their data.

Dropsuite's website backup and monitoring service Dropmysite -- designed for users with minimal IT knowledge -- allows SMEs to schedule automatic backups, monitor website availability and performance, and restore lost or corrupted data.

Gavin Gibson, COO of Crazy Domains, likened Dropmysite to an insurance policy.

"If anything goes wrong, you're covered," Gibson said.

Dropmysite is able to back up websites built on most platforms, including WordPress, Magento, Joomla, TYPO3, Drupal, and MODX, and all files are encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption.

The service is currently being used in more than 100 countries, with this number expected to increase as Dropsuite taps into Crazy Domains' SME customer base.

"A website can get hacked, infected by a virus, or critical files can be deleted by mistake, resulting in a website's data being corrupted or the site rendered useless. In fact, most website owners don't always know that their sites have been compromised until it's too late," said Ridley Ruth, COO of Dropsuite.

"Hardest impacted by website data loss are small and mid-sized business -- which is why we're excited about partnering with Crazy Domains."

Dropsuite, based in Singapore, is also in the middle of raising AU$8 million at 10 cents per share ahead of its listing on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX).

Earlier this year, a slew of cyberattacks on small business websites by pro-terrorist hackers prompted Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman Kate Carnell to issue a reminder to online shopfronts to invest in security measures.

This was shortly followed by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announcing that the government would invest AU$240 million into its cybersecurity strategy, with a particular focus on the sharing of threat information between business and government.

The government also announced that it would spend AU$136 million on small business grants to boost security, increase the government's cybercrime intelligence and investigation capabilities, create a threat information-sharing portal, and be able to identify vulnerabilities in government systems.

At the 2016 Everything IoT Summit in Sydney, UNSW cybersecurity professor Jill Slay said poor cybersecurity practices among SMEs put larger organisations at risk, despite their own best efforts at tackling threats.

"The risk is at the bottom end. In Australia, a lot of SMEs, they struggle to deal with cybersecurity because it is hard for them to access the right level of expertise at the right costs," Slay said.