As a small business, it is important have a plan in place for backing up and securing your data.
As your business grows and you continue to implement new technologies into your business, it becomes increasingly important that your business properly backs up your data on a regular basis. Data loss can be extremely detrimental to any business, and even force many businesses to shut their doors within a few short months of the data loss taking place. Luckily, there are some simple measures that your business can take that will help you to ensure that you are safe from data loss and able to maintain your systems appropriately. Follow these basic tips to safeguard your business and mitigate data loss risk.
1. Preparedness is Key
The best thing that a business can do to protect themselves against data loss is to have a plan in place in the event that data loss occurs. This begins with ensuring that you have the proper backup systems in place. All businesses should institute daily (or at least weekly) backups both in the cloud and on physical hard drives to ensure that no data is truly lost. It is also a good idea to speak with a company that are experts in data loss and data recovery, who can help you to put together a preparedness plan that keeps your business safe.
2. Start with Proper Policies and Training
Did you know that internal employees are responsible for almost half of all data loss? We can’t always account for human error, but a great way to mitigate internal data loss risk is to ensure that you have the proper policies in place to ensure that your employees are properly trained on mitigating data loss. Additionally, make sure that your team is properly trained on handling sensitive data, as one of the leading causes of data theft is actually internal teams sending data to the wrong person, or including data that is sensitive in an email unknowingly. By putting effective policies in place you can greatly reduce the risk of data loss and theft.
3. Backup on Two Physical Hard Drives
All businesses should have a physical copy of their data backed up on a regular basis. The most simple and inexpensive way to achieve this is to keep your data backed up on at least two physical hard drives. This helps to ensure that your data remains safe even if the main system and one of the physical backups fails. The chances of that are highly unlikely, and the chances of having all three fail are even more unlikely. Backups should be scheduled on a daily or weekly basis depending on your businesses’ data needs.
4. Do not Keep Sensitive Data on Laptops
One of the easiest ways for a thief to gain access to sensitive data is by stealing a company laptop, which is a much more common occurrence than you would think. Try to keep all sensitive data off of employee and company laptops and ensure that you are storing all data on removal flash drives. This helps to ensure that the data is properly backed up, without making for a security risk.
5. Regularly Test Your Backups
Not only should you be scheduling backups on a daily or weekly basis, but you should also be testing those backups all the time. Try to test each of your backups (and also check your cloud data backup systems for stability) at least once per week so that you can have peace of mind and know that everything is working as intended.
If you are interested in putting together a data loss prevention plan that is customized for your business, please reach out and contact us today to schedule your initial chat with our data loss experts.
Every time I come to your site you have another interesting post up. A friend of mine was talking to me about this topic several weeks ago, so I think I’ll e-mail them the url here and see what they say.