Data may have become the new oil, but many consistently fail to protect such a valuable resource, writes David McMurdo, regional director: South Africa at Veritas Technologies.
Over a thousand mobile phones, laptops and hard drives are lost or stolen each day. Stored within these lost devices are sensitive intellectual property, customer and employee details, and business-critical information. In many cases, the data has never been backed up, which means it’s gone forever.
World Backup Day is a good reminder for us all to back up our treasured data. Businesses should also take the opportunity to declutter their digital data and educate their employees on best practice when it comes to data etiquette.
Here’s how you can take back control of your data:
* Back up at regular intervals – Setting up a regular schedule to make multiple copies of your data may sound obvious but is one step that many organisations forget to take. In the unlikely event of a cloud outage or ransomware attack, you want to maintain business resilience and ensure operations continue to run with minimal disruption.
* Apply data protection across all workloads – Data is growing rapidly and becoming more fragmented across clouds, virtual environments and application platforms. Unified data protection is the only way your IT organisation can deliver required service levels while limited costing and risk – whether data resides on-premises or in the cloud.
* Isolate your backups – It’s crucial that the technology you use to store backup data is not part of your network. This is especially relevant for ransomware attacks. Public cloud is reliable and cost-effective to set up. It is also very easy to scale as your business grows and evolves.
* The 3-2-1 rule – Keep at least three copies of your data, on at least two devices, with at least one copy offsite.
* Test your recovery process – Running fire drills on a regular basis will help ensure employees are familiar with the processes involved in recovering the data that they need. This may involve checking that a secondary site will go live if the main site fails, or it can be as simple as recovering an arbitrary file to a PC and checking it is identical to the original.