3 Tips to Improve Data Protection for a Solo/Small Business

Running a business either by yourself or with only a small team can be tough! There is already a lot on your plate on a regular basis. The last thing you want to be dealing with is a massive data loss.

Maybe a hard drive breaks, or your laptop dies. The wrong file could be accidentally deleted.

All these things have the possibility of causing huge delays to your workflow, not to mention can impact your clients as well.

The saying goes: “prevention is better than cure”. This is certainly the case for Data Loss – it is much easier to prevent it from happening than it is to restore data or even recreate it.

Here are a few easy-to-implement tips that can massively improve the security of your business’ data.

3 Copies of Your Data

This simply refers to storing copies of your data in 3 different places at the same time. Statistically, the risk of losing all 3 different copies of your data is a lot lower than losing 2 or 1. For example, if your main work laptop dies, you would still have all your data and files on a separate machine or hard drive – therefore allowing you to still access what you need and perform your services for clients.

An example of 3 different places you could store your data could be:

• Your main work pc/laptop
• An external hard drive
• Cloud storage (such as Sharepoint or Google Drive)

Secure Remote Backup

Just as the name implies, this is about having an offsite copy of your data you can use to backup from. The reason why this is so good is that if anything ever happened on-site (fire, flood, theft, etc) and all your copies of your data on-site were destroyed, you would still have a fall-back to use and recover from.

These days there are many cloud backup providers out there. Often these can be easy to use, store data on and restore from. Many of which will have automated backup schedules you can make – meaning you don’t even have to remember to backup yourself. These services are actually very accessible with their prices now.

Accurate Backup Monitoring & Reporting

Okay, so you have a backup in place – good! However, like with all technology, things can go wrong or fail sometimes. How do you find out this has happened? The worst-case scenario would be when you desperately need to restore from your backup in a time of urgency. It would be devastating if then you found that the last non-failed backup was from weeks ago.

This is where accurate monitoring and reports come in.

If you are using a good cloud backup service, it SHOULD have this built into it already. It should be able to tell you if a backup has failed and why. These checks should be happening at least on a daily basis – if not several times a day. Like what was mentioned earlier, backup software is fairly cheap these days and is definitely worth investing in.

An alternative would be to have someone perform a managed backup service for you. This is where you will pay a provider to manage your backup for you. They’ll do all the monitoring and reporting for you, and give you a heads up when something goes wrong or if you need to take action at any point.

Typically this is more expensive but means your data is not only protected via backups, but also by the skills of experts.

Want More Tips and Actions to Improve Your Data Security?

For more tips about how you can better protect your business from data loss, we have created a FREE resource. It acts as a checklist and can inform you about what you have in place and what you can do to improve. Click here to sign up for it.