Back, back, back it up

There are multiply ways to safeguard your company’s data:

• Having a privacy policy followed by your employees
• Establish Password management
• Govern Internet and Social Media Usage
• Manage Email Usage
• Govern and Manage company owned mobile devices
• Report Security Incidents and how to respond and mitigate damage.

 

But none of these carefully planned policies and protections will mean anything if you don’t have the main key to retrieving your data. Backup, backup, backup.

 

If you get hacked, have your office broken into, get a virus, or fall victim to a natural disaster like flooding or even a fire, having regular backup of your data is what’s going to ensure you’ll be able to reinstate your company data.

 

Be prepared for the worst case scenario, even if it seems excessive at this moment. Because when you least expect it, there might come the time your data is lost and these precautions will be what saves you and your business.

 

Start with syncing your data with your Office 365 OneDrive. Cloud storage makes basic levels of backup accessible to everyone. OneDrive can sync your documents from your computer to the cloud, so when your laptop decides to spontaneously combust without warning, your documents are still safe. It has the added bonus of allowing you access to those documents from anywhere via the online portal.

 

OneDrive doesn’t answer all you backup concerns, it only goes so far. It can’t store data from your CRM or line of business software. For many businesses, this, and other crucial business information might be stored on a separate server. This is where a real backup comes into play. If you have an in-house server you, without a doubt should have an offsite backup. This insures that any criminal or catastrophic circumstances that could damage your server, won’t also take-out your backup. This includes weather, fire, and break-ins.

 

We also suggest including a secondary backup to best safeguard your data. Although it’s important to have a backup secluded from your primary server, a backup service is only useful as long as you pay the bill, once you cancel, or worse fall on unexpected hard times in your business, that security blanket instantly disappears.  Not to mention those off-site backup servers are just like any other physical server and could fail at any time. While most services have redundancies built-in just in case, you never want to put all your data eggs in one storage basket.

 

Having some sort of external hard drive or another in-house backup option allows you to have complete control of your data; and if all other backups fail, you’ve got one final safety net to fall back on. But that can also give you a false sense of security, which is why we only recommend it as a secondary backup. Backing-up yourself isn’t ideal. It’s often time consuming, entirely inconvenient, and may cause you to lose some sleep with every high wind warning; but if you want that final failsafe, this is just one more way for you to take care of your data.

 

Not sure which backup solutions are right for your business? Give us a call!