Articles Search Engine

Starting and expanding a small business can be a complicated process with countless things to consider and plan for, most of them essential for the growth and stability of your business. With more information being created every day and stored either on local computers or online, something many businesses do not effectively plan for is the potential loss or compromise of that data and the time and cost to recover it–or the ramifications to their business if it is not salvageable.

Data loss, natural disasters, data corruption and hardware failure:

We’ve seen lots of businesses experience catastrophic losses that forced them to temporarily close their doors to regroup and rebuild information. One particular case stands out where they were fortunately able to restore enough critical data and get their business back on track. We found out afterwards if they hadn’t been able to retrieve this data the business would have shut down and hundreds of people would have been out of a job.

Everybody knows that we should back up our information because it could be damaged or corrupted. Many businesses don’t make adequate backups, or they haven’t verified that good backups are actually being created. We’ve seen many businesses who had a backup solution in place but the backups had never been verified and they had been writing blank or bad data. The entire data recovery industry thrives based on this, performing over $4 billion dollars of work per year.

Small businesses without a disaster strategy in place have a very low survival rate. Estimates by Gartner indicate that the majority of small businesses do not have an adequate disaster recovery plan in place.

Prevention

Create a report of what information is stored where so you know where your critical data is.

Implement an automatic backup of critical data to a separate device, SAN or external hard drive.

If possible, create a backup to an offsite location to disaster proof your place of business.

Regularly test the data that’s been backed up to verify it is being correctly written.

Replace storage media regularly. Hard drives cost very little but data recovery is much more expensive.

Resolution

Determine what information is most critical to retrieve and from which systems affected.

What data can be rebuilt in a reasonable amount of time that won’t severely impact your business?

Are there any backups available or recent copies on other computers?

Contact a firm specializing in data recovery if you are unable to salvage data.

Avoid trying to repair the media yourself as this can cause irreversible damage to your data.

Security and theft

Theft and security compromises tend to come in two forms, from external sources and internal ones and most attacks come from inside sources. Many businesses have all of their information freely or easily accessible and an attacker can easily copy huge amounts of data or walk away with a hard drive everything stored on it. The same situation applies if an intruder breaks into your network and is able to copy any data that has been shared or is being transmitted.

Businesses are required to take specific steps to secure sensitive customer information such as credit cards and if they have not done this they can be held responsible for any financial losses. For businesses storing this information in a filing cabinet, an attacker could potentially walk away with enormous amounts of sensitive data.

Recommendations

Encrypt sensitive data and store it digitally if possible on a secured computer. Avoid physical copies if possible.

Limit access to this information as much as possible. Don’t store it if it’s not essential to do so.

Use SSL to encrypt and transmit data on your company website or network so it can’t be read in transit.

Ensure that security updates and software patches are installed as soon as they are published.

Make sure virus, malware and rootkit monitoring software is in place on every networked computer.