5 Things you must know about your business data recovery.

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Successful businesses know that to address tomorrow’s data disaster, their prep work has to start today. It might sound cliché, but proactive maintenance and disaster recovery preparedness is the most efficient way of tackling the latest data breach, malware intrusion, or data storage problem. When anything can happen at any moment, from fires and power outage, to theft and human error, most companies can’t afford to lose a single file—let alone access to their sensitive data for days, weeks, or months at a time.

What is a data disaster?

Any event that would cause data to be unintentionally overwritten qualifies as a “data disaster.” This could be a computer or storage system failing, the result of a virus or malware, accidents, or even deliberate sabotage.

Now that you know the basics, there are actually five simple steps that you can—and should—take right now in order to prevent a critical loss of data.

Conduct a data assessment

Businesses should have a solid grasp on what files are important, how they’re used, and by whom. Having information about usage will allow your company to assign importance to specific chunks of data, and create a blueprint for what data will be essential in the event of a disaster and more importantly, prioritize it by who will require access to it.

Not every file will carry equal importance, but assigning value to each piece of data will better ensure that business-critical information is secured and backed up in the event of a data loss. Your IT department will be more effective at protecting sensitive data when the essential is sorted from the non-essential. Once data has been categorized based on priority and importance, you should start the backup process.

Start storing your data in a secure cloud

Companies large and small are moving more and more of their data offsite, into cloud storage. The benefits of cloud storage are immense as you’re essentially moving your network into a hosted cloud environment, which is then delivered on-demand to your business’s employees, wherever they are

The real merit to keeping your data on the cloud is that your provider handles all redundancy, updates, and security on your behalf. This not only reduces overhead costs of handling those things in-house, but adds an additional layer of security to your existing data disaster recovery plan and management.

Encrypt your data

Having the proper encryption helps secure the data you’re storing elsewhere because it’s not enough to just store data offsite or in the cloud. The data backup process has to be supported by sufficient encryption practices, both in transit and while idle. You want to ensure that unauthorized users can’t access data while you’re retrieving a backup, while it’s at rest, or during a backup session.

Incorporating strong encryption into your data backup plan can drastically reduce the likelihood of a security breach as well. For those companies also utilizing cloud storage solutions, vet the process with your provider and make sure that no one can access the encryption keys.