Data protection is important to many businesses today for several reasons. Several factors such as the right technology, staff training, and policy compliance must be considered to protect your data properly. You should know a few things when evaluating a backup system or third-party service provider.
What Data Is Worth Protecting?
To protect your data, you need to know what kind of information needs protecting. It may be difficult to determine exactly what type of data should be backed up in some cases. This can be true for smaller companies that rely largely on less technical employees or larger organizations with a wide range of business applications.
Data Mapping Can Help You Identify What Information Is Most Valuable
Suppose your business is constantly changing or has grown more complex. In that case, it may be necessary to map out all of the different applications, systems, and data sources used by your company. This will allow you to prioritize which files are needed to recover operations. Also, this will help you to determine which types of media should be used for backups, such as Local or Cloud.
Establishing a Backup and Recovery Plan Is Essential
An effective backup and recovery policy includes a regular schedule to ensure that data stored on your systems are secure and retrievable in the event of a disaster. According to Industry Best Practices, your entire Operating System and your Data should be scanned for Viruses, Malware and Ransomware daily.
Regular updates are critical and should take place according to your software application bulletins.
A local business continuity plan will ensure a clean, transition to spare equipment and minimize downtime. This would include a second device, like the BCS-4000 which is designed to take over in the event of an Infrastructure failure.
Offsite Backups are also very critical and should be scheduled daily. It is critical that your data resides in Canada under Canadian Privacy Legislation, which means you need to contract with a backup and storage supplier that meets the requirement of data storage redundancy, encryption and 24/7 guarded facilities.
How Much Protection Do You Need?
Along with establishing a backup schedule comes the need to determine how much protection is needed. Some files need to be available when needed. This may require only a daily backup, while others, such as transaction files or databases, will need more protection to recover large amounts of data that has changed over time.
Establishing a Recovery Plan Is Key
For backups to be useful in a disaster, data must be recovered. That means that not only must the data exist, but it also has to be accessible. Organizations should establish a disaster recovery plan that outlines the policies and procedures employees will follow to restore systems after a disaster. This can include getting rid of outdated files or applications being used less frequently so more important information can be saved and a process for restoring data from backups.
Protecting data is more important than sharing it. Some of the essential considerations for any organization are its data protection and backup services policies. Today, with an ever-increasing volume of critical information, all businesses should take proactive measures to protect data; once it is lost, it is difficult and expensive to replace.
Understand and follow the above tips to ensure that your company's data is protected against a disaster. Not only will this help you avoid losing valuable information, but it can also save your business both time and money in the long run.