4 ways to protect your business from data loss
A couple of weeks ago, hotels, universities, businesses and hospitals became the target of a series of cyber attacks. The repercussions were vast, putting many businesses and individuals at risk – and, where hospitals are concerned, even resulted in several deaths. Cyber attacks are not the only cause of data loss, though. Data loss can be a result of human error, natural disaster, hard drive failure and computer crashes. At this point in time, it’s a reasonable thing to say that almost everyone at some point has been a victim of data loss in one way or another.
In the day and age we live in, the risk of data loss is high, but we’ve come up with four ways for you to protect yourself (in both a personal and professional capacity):
- Create Backups
You’ve heard this way too many times not to know how important it is. Create backups. And then backup your backups. I cannot stress how crucial this is. Losing data is as easy as a random shutdown of your computer, and an autosave will only help you so far. To truly protect your company from data loss, backups should go beyond the company server. I’ve found that the best method of backing up data is the ‘3-2-1’ method. It’s simple: backup three copies on two mediums of which one should be stored off-site (the cloud). I recommend some data be stored old-school, just in case. In fact, it might even be beneficial to incorporate this into a company policy.
- Invest in Data Recovery Software
We live in an age of memory sticks, external hard drives, Google drives, dropboxes – an endless supply of technology to help protect your data. But you and I both know these backups are not sufficient, not all the time, anyway. We’ve lost series and movies, photos of your last family holiday, assignments (and in the digital age, the old “my dog ate my homework” excuse doesn’t carry) and those legal documents you spent the whole weekend drafting. Surely there’s a tool to ensure something as silly as a computer crash doesn’t leave you back at square one? Invest in data recovery software for peace of mind that, should something happen that would normally cause those precious moments/documents/Game of Thrones episodes to be lost forever, you’ll be able to retrieve them in a minimal amount of time and with very little effort.
- Know Your Data
We live in a society that indoctrinates the saying “knowledge is power”. As a business, your data is more than knowledge; it’s your currency. Therefore, it is paramount for you to know the currency you have and its value. The theory is that you can’t know how important something is if you aren’t aware of its value. Furthermore, knowing your data ensures that if (when – eek!) your data does go missing, you’ll be able to pinpoint it right away because you’ll know what you’re looking for.
- Regulate, Regulate and Regulate
Regulate your data, regulate your data backups and do it frequently. This part is related to knowing your data and is equally important. Regulating and reviewing is timeous and doing it frequently can be something short of tedious, but the rewards far outweigh the effort. It goes beyond knowing your data: regulating means managing and maintaining all your data to make sure that it’s all where it should be. Part of regulating includes knowing who has access to your data and managing it requires
frequent password and storage location changes. There are too many sinister characters out there looking for a way to take advantage of any weakness to let data regulation slip under your radar. Are you willing to risk it?
Take away points are simple:
- Backup your backups
- Buy yourself some peace of mind with data recovery software
- Be cognisant of your data and it’s value
- Manage your data and the subsequent backups
Technology is good, but the preparation of your staff and equipping them with the how and why is better. It’s as they say: teamwork makes the dream work.
Don’t have the time? Need expert advice? We have a team of professional tech bots (and some support people) that can happily guide you through this process. Contact us today to find out how we can help you!