3 Tips for Protecting Your Business Data
No matter the size of your business, you always need to take precautions to keep your data and the private information of your customers safe. With many resources available, you can minimize the chances of data breaches or loss of data due to system failures.
Be Cautious About Remote Access
Working remotely is increasingly common in both small and large businesses. Although this opportunity can provide more flexibility to your workers and less overhead for your business, remote access to your business network can come with security hurdles.
To minimize the risk, you may want to restrict the type of information workers can access remotely. You should also instruct workers to remain vigilant about protecting their devices and how they access company networks.
Investing in enterprise-level antivirus software that workers can use on their personal devices may offer more protection than software available for the typical computer user. Workers should also avoid using open networks to access the business network and ensure their home networks are secured.
Have Multiple Backup Points
Storing your data in a single, centralized location is the easiest way to face loss of data in the future. You should always have your data stored at multiple locations so it can be restored promptly and make it harder to for hackers to access sensitive information.
For small businesses, regularly saving your data to an external hard drive may be enough. Using a portable, wireless hard drive to regularly transfer data from your business computer can make it easy to have an extra copy if your computer is ever lost to theft or damaged. Additionally, small businesses may want to invest in cloud backup services as a tertiary method of saving their data.
For medium to large businesses, you should have off-site methods of securing your data. One of the most common methods is using a data center. Since the data center you choose handles the nuances of protecting your data, the process can be less cumbersome. Often parts of your data may be on different servers at the data center and in different locations. If anything goes wrong, this prevents all of your data from being compromised or lost.
Protect Virtual Environments
Virtualization is an essential component for many business functions. Since your business may require a unique configuration of software and virtual platforms to deal with different components of your business, such as logistics and order processing, you cannot afford to experience failures of your system.
One way to have your business back up and running is to use virtual disaster recovery software. All of the configurations for virtualization are frequently saved off-site so in the event of hardware failure or other problems, the virtual environments can be restored within minutes. Since the disaster recovery software can be viewed as a single solution to all your virtualization problems, you do not need individual technicians to fix each component of your virtual architecture.
Depending on the software you choose, your virtual environments may be saved on private servers (on or off-site), the cloud, or a hybrid system. One of the advantages of using an off-site recovery system, either an off-site server or cloud-based system, is you reduce or eliminate the amount of on-site resources dedicated to maintaining backup versions of your virtual environments.
When choosing a disaster recovery software, you should also consider the manner in which it can be deployed. You may want IT personnel to have access to disaster recovery from remote locations in emergencies. This way, if you have an on-site IT department, no one has to return to the office at odd hours to handle a crisis situation.
With the threat of data breaches and hardware failures being a realistic problem for any business, you need to have safeguards in place to prevent problems from happening or soften the impact. Proactively protecting your business's data and quickly rebounding from system failures will minimize lost revenue and inconveniences for your business.
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