Avoiding Data Loss: Key Preventative Tips

While money and staff are always important, there are few areas as vital to a business as data. Unfortunately, even in today’s world, it is something many owners severely overlook.

To this end, here are a few ways to reduce the impact data loss can cause on your business. Whether it’s through offsite storage locations or recovery methods, these tips can help ensure a more positive result for your company.

Offsite storage

One of the best ways to protect yourself from big risks if offsite backup. By having a second storage option (which is still secure enough to be compliant with data protection regulations) you know all your data is backed-up and stored securely.

With this vital back-up you can maintain business operations, business continuity and keep our company URL up and running should any problems befall the master copy. Not only do you not lose your data but the company’s operations don’t need to stop as a result of a technical issue. You can find out more about business continuity services from reputable firms like Iron Mountain at http://www.ironmountain.co.uk/services/data-protection/business-continuity.

When talking about offsite back-ups, it’s worth taking a while to discuss the Cloud as an option. This is a remote server so it has all the benefits of a back-up while its online nature makes it accessible should you need it. It can also have some of its own risks (if the server isn’t secure enough) so don’t forget to test this. When your company’s success is on the line, choosing a poor server runs a greater chance of disaster.

Recovery

Of course, there may still be a need to recover data and recuperate from such an incident. If you don’t, your business is only relying on the back-up which puts it at severe risk if something happens again.

Such recovery is always worthwhile to ensure data is still available. Likewise, it helps to understand where it went and, in turn, understand the nature of the incident that lead up to the problem.

Proactive protection

Finally, while it is important to have various safety nets and levels of backup in place, proactive measures can ensure these measures are not needed in the first place. A need to recover from a serious data or computer incident is crucial but taking steps to reduce these risks in the first place is equally important and proactive measures you can take include ensuring any security programs are kept updated and restricting data access to only authorised personnel.