Ways to Be Smarter About Your Data

Here’s a fact that you’ve heard before: data loss is a nightmare for your business, and ransomware is the boogeyman. Once your data has been breached, your company’s reputation is damaged in perpetuity. That’s why it is important to confront these fears and start prioritizing data security. 

We get it, people everywhere are sharing all this data without a care in the world, but businesses are targeted and are losing revenue, data, and face in the process. What can you do differently? We will discuss three things you can do right now to improve your organizational data security.

#1 Keep Sensitive Data Behind Your Firewall

The majority of data is secure behind your business’ defenses, but with the clear capital benefits brought by cloud computing, more organizations than ever are moving their business-critical data and applications outside of their control to the cloud. This could lead to detrimental situations like your data being intercepted or your cloud platform being breached. 

That’s not to say that cloud platforms don’t provide passable security, most of them absolutely do, but what happens when one of your employees go on a trip and use the airport Wi-Fi? That cloud platform filled with critical information is just lying in wait for some hacker to come along and steal it. Using a virtual private network is a good option, but not as good as keeping your sensitive data in-house. 

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

#2 Keep Continuous Backups

Protecting data assets is one of the first steps of organizational risk management. There is no better solution on the market today to do just that than a backup and disaster recovery platform (BDR). Not only does this allow you onsite local backup, it also pushes copies to the cloud, ensuring that you don’t keep your proverbial eggs (data) in one basket (server).

Another suggestion we have to make is that you should frequently test your data backup solution to make sure that it is working properly. It would be devastating if you needed to restore your data only to have the backup system you use unavailable, or worse yet, corrupted when you went to use it. 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 Information Systems

Backup or no, the best way to ascertain if there are problems with your IT is to monitor those systems closely. In doing so you will be able to decipher 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 some of the most dynamic remote monitoring software on the market to mitigate anything that stands in the way of your organization’s productivity and security initiatives. If you would like to know more about SMART Services or how to ensure that your software is up to date, deployed, and monitored closely, call our knowledgeable professionals today at 586 258-0650 .