Your data may be the most important component of your business. It is the fuel that powers productivity, competitive advantage and operational excellence. A customer database—including contact information, sales history and details of the customer’s business—can be sorted and weighted to capitalise on every interaction with every customer. Product documentation, troubleshooting information and sales information can be made available to customers via the company website. Sales and marketing tools on an intranet can provide sales and customer support representatives with the tools they need to better assist customers. To make all this happen, you want to ensure that your data is easily accessible to your employees, securely stored, and regularly backed up.

Accessible

In some cases easy accessibility may mean loading portions of that data onto a laptop, tablet PC or other mobile device so that your employees have instantaneous access to the data. While this scenario is inherently less secure, using full-disk encryption on the mobile device will ensure that the data is secure in case of loss or theft.

In addition to providing employees easy access to the data they need to get the job done, maintaining an up-to-date website, with complete and current information on your products and services, can empower customers to find answers to their own questions, reducing sales cycle time and lowering support costs.

Secure

Ensuring that access is quick and easy while keeping your data safe and secure should not be considered mutually exclusive tasks.   Separating highly sensitive information on locked-down volumes, and limiting a user’s access to only the data necessary to do the job, will mitigate some of the potential risk.

Company data stored on mobile devices, including USB hard drives and USB keys, should be encrypted. Hardware and software solutions are available to make the process transparent to your users. Lost or stolen mobile devices, if encrypted, are less likely to pose a security risk.

Backup

The importance of regular backups cannot be understated. Recovering and recreating lost data is at best costly, and at worst impossible. Creating redundancy and implementing a regular backup plan for your data is like insurance for your business. If you ever need it, you will be glad you invested in protecting your most important asset.

Business today is no longer confined by geography or time zones, making it critical that your employees have secure access to important business files wherever they may be.   Today’s advanced storage solutions allow you not only to back up your data and make it accessible when you need it, but also provide innovative measures to minimise security risks. By creating a solid data management plan, you can get the most out of your critical business information.