You Have to Be Smarter About Your Data

You’ve heard it over and over for the past several years: data loss is a disaster. A data breach can ruin your business. Ransomware is a business’ biggest enemy. Your reputation can never recover after a data breach. These statements may be redundant, but if you don’t heed the message behind them, you will likely regret it. 

The problem is that real businesses are having their networks breached and becoming victims of hackers losing data, revenue, and face in the process. What could they have done differently? Sometimes it was a lot, but often times organizations that are breached are vigilant about their cybersecurity, they just have one person make a mistake and it affects the entirety of the network. This month, we thought it would be good to remind you of three practices you can adhere to that will keep your organization’s IT from being breached.

#1 Keep Sensitive Data Behind Your Firewall

This one seems like it is pretty self-explanatory, but with a lot of businesses wooed by the cost savings and scalability of cloud computing, you are beginning to see that organizations that spend a fair amount on their IT having data intercepted because they are sending it out unprotected. 

Sure, your typical cloud platform will provide passable data security, but what happens when one of your employees decide that they are going to use an unsecured Wi-Fi connection to send and receive data from your cloud servers? Transferring data over these connections is always risky, and doing so without a virtual private network or some type of encryption is just asking for problems. 

If you want to keep your business’ data secure, one of the best things you can do is to ascertain which data absolutely needs to be protected and then store that data on locally hosted systems. This way you can control access, security, and the overall management of the data system. 

#2 Keep Continuous Backups

This suggestion is more about protecting your data in lieu of disaster, but the smart business will dedicate resources to the redundancy of their data. This is where cloud services really are worth their money. Most cloud services will come with built-in redundancy, which means any data saved on these platforms will come with a working backup platform. For local environments, a BDR makes sense. Not only does it give you control over your backup system, it ensures that if something were to happen--and, there are certainly a lot of situations that can happen where your organizational data could be compromised, lost, or corrupted--that you have a recent copy of that data to restore. 

One additional suggestion is to frequently test your backup. It would be a shame if you set up and pay for a comprehensive backup platform only to have it malfunction. By testing the backup system, you will know that your data is, in fact, available in the event that something goes wrong and you have to restore it. 

#3 Monitor Your Entire Network

No matter if you have a backup or not, the best way to ascertain if there are problems is to continuously monitor your information systems. By monitoring these systems, you will be able to judge whether or not hardware is functioning properly, whether the systems are properly secured against outside infiltration, and where you need to prioritize your management efforts. 

Our expert IT technicians use cutting edge automation technologies to fuel our around-the-clock monitoring and management service, helping our clients be sure that their information systems are working as intended. Your business’ network has a lot of information going in and out of it all the time, and by keeping your ear to the grindstone, so to speak, you will be able to catch issues while they are small, and well before they become productivity-sapping problems. 

If you would like more information about how to properly manage and protect your data, call us today at 708-781-7110.