Data Backups
It’s important to back up your data to ensure that you can restore your files if they’re either lost or damaged.
Regularly backing up your data is an easy and fast solution for your business if there is a system outage or breach, or if your data is corrupted or compromised in some way.
Quick tips
Your business’s digital data is invaluable. However, due to its nature, it’s possible for data to become corrupted or lost. Make sure you’re prepared for important data to become unrecoverable.
Be consistent
Back up your data regularly and consistently as part of routine operations.
Encryption
Secure backups in an encrypted state and restrict access to backups to your employees that are responsible for testing or restoration activities.
Multiple destinations
Back up your systems to multiple destinations, using either a detachable external hard drive or cloud-based backup. Having multiple destinations for your backup data helps ensure that recovery will be possible if one of the backups is compromised in some way.
Storage
Store your external hard drives, or other physical backup devices, in a secure place offsite.
External devices
Prepare boot disks via USB or via another external device in case of a system crash.
Labeling
Label any sensitive information you have on external media storage devices to ensure that it’s handled appropriately and safely.
Destruction
Properly destroy any physical media that contains sensitive personal financial information that belongs to your business.
Why is it important?
Data loss can cause real damage to your business. Unauthorized access to data or data loss can harm your business’s reputation, resulting in legal or monetary penalties, or even causing business interruptions or shutdowns.
Take the following steps to help mitigate the problems that data loss can cause.
Portable USB Hard Drives
Depending on the size of your business, an external hard drive can be a good option to back up your data and ensure the safety of your computer systems.
You can use one drive for each computer and use software that automatically backs up the computer systems. That way, if you suffer any data loss, each of your employees will have a distinct way of restoring their computer’s data.
Report an incident or suspicious activity