Whether your company trades in intellectual property, sensitive customer data or financial information, data is your business. Making that data available to your stakeholders while keeping it safe from misuse, theft and loss is one of the most urgent and important issues facing businesses today.

Extend Your Security Policy Beyond the Desktop

In addition to locking down your network and limiting access to those who have the proper credentials, you should consider scenarios where your important data resides on mobile devices. Company data stored on laptop computers, portable hard drives, personal digital assistants, thumb drives and even mobile phones is also vulnerable. Lost or stolen mobile devices can be a danger to the health of your company if the data isn’t securely locked down.

Manage Your Mobile Data

Create a mobile data policy and implement a security plan to protect your company from potentially catastrophic data loss or theft. There are a number of ways to secure your mobile devices so that data misuse due to lost or stolen devices is reduced or eliminated. Other than using strong passwords and limiting user rights to specific data, options such as encryption software allow you to encrypt specific data or whole directories of files so your data is rendered unusable in the case of theft or loss. Hard drives that have full disk encryption built into the drive offer optimized performance and security through dedicated hardware and firmware. Drive-level encryption provides a more robust solution than software encryption.

Tips and Tricks

 

• Categorize your data for backup frequency.
• Keep in mind that critical data may require remote backup.
• Back up early and often.

Other steps you can and should take to protect your data include some that may seem obvious but are often neglected, such as regular backups and RAID mirroring. Personal servers provide automatic backups, secure data sharing on a network and guaranteed restoration. Advanced SATA enterprise hard drives enable RAID systems that perform more reliably and are easier to build and support than those built with ordinary SATA drives.

The more security precautions you employ, the more secure your data and company assests will be.

Protect Your Business from Catastrophic Data Loss

Catastrophic data loss could cost you your business. When assessing your backup plan, remember that all data is not created equal. Some data, like financial transactions, need to be immediately backed up using a fast, drive-based system. Other data, like email, may be safely backed up once every 24 hours or less, depending on your business needs. Once you’ve categorized your data and selected the appropriate backup method and frequency, you will need to make sure that your important data is also backed up at a remote location in case of a catastrophic regional event.

Whether you’re a large enterprise business or a two-person startup business, establishing a plan to secure and backing up your information assets is not something you can put off for when you have more time —your business may depend on it.