Protection and backup: how can you avoid losing your data?

Businesses have never had as much digital data in their hands as they do today: customer files, accounts, payroll, etc. The critical nature of this information, combined with poor practices, exposes them to the risk of disruption, or even permanent cessation, of their activity. This article shows that it doesn't have to be expensive or difficult to protect your data effectively. Take a closer look at automatic backup.

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What causes data loss?

The figures vary depending on the source of the data, but the four main reasons carry roughly the same weight:

• ¼ of data loss is caused by hardware or software failure:
  Hard drive failure, power supply failure, sudden operating system shutdown, corrupted software, corrupted files and databases.
• ¼ result from human error:
  Accidental deletion of files, loss of storage media (USB stick, CD...).
• ¼ result from direct or indirect intentional acts:
  Viruses, hacking, hard disk formatting, file deletion.
• ¼ result from disasters:
  Fire, flood, earthquake, tornado, etc.

With this in mind, here are the right questions to ask yourself to assess your level of protection and the risks involved:

• Does your company have a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) in case of data loss?
• Do you regularly back up your critical data, and on what media?
• What would happen if your critical data was damaged, lost or stolen?
• In the event of data loss, what efforts would you need to make to return to a normal situation?
• Are you protected against intrusion attempts?

If any of these questions reveal a weakness in your organisation, take quick and simple steps to remedy it.

Best practice and low-cost solutions

Choose online software

Generally speaking, online software for businesses offers better security standards than self-hosted computing. Leading publishers in their field (messaging, collaboration, accounting, payroll, etc.) offer a software availability rate of over 99.5%, systematic daily replication of your data, recent, secure servers and professional maintenance teams.

Since no data is hosted in your company, the loss of hardware does not impact your business. SaaS software has many other advantages.

Train your staff in good practices

The use of mobile devices, personal equipment, USB sticks, frequent travel, etc.: all these new uses open up recurring security gaps. Here are a few tips to follow:

• Invite all employees to change their main passwords every 3 months
• Draw up a data protection policy and communicate it throughout the company
• Train employees in the correct use of the company's most critical software (email, CRM, etc.)
• Secure document workflows. Google Apps and Office 365, for example, make it possible to share documents outside the company and then restrict rights once collaboration is complete.
• No longer store documents in a local directory that is not backed up (personal hard drive, USB stick). Use the company server or an online Drive (Google Drive, DropBox).
• Close your sessions at the end of the day. Firefox, for example, allows you to do this automatically when you close the browser

Use a modern backup solution

Over the last 5 years, backup tools have become more and more popular among VSEs and SMEs because they are cheaper and easier to install. Business Recovery Plans (BRPs), which were originally designed for large companies, are now available to all businesses.
Make sure you have the following guarantees:

• daily backup to secure data centres
• local backup on a hard disk (the Oxibox NAS is fire and water resistant)
• data encryption
• incremental or delta-block backup (consumes less bandwidth)
• immediate Disaster Recovery Plan in the event of data loss
• data loss insurance

In 2016, EaseUS found that 50% of hard disks die after 5 years. What's more, 75% of companies that suffer a loss of critical data cease trading within two years.

Protecting against malicious acts

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To date, a virus has never caused a company to lose data in the Cloud. SaaS software benefits from the best technologies in terms of data security.
For the rest of your applications and files on servers or computers, you can protect them with an anti-intrusion solution. Bitdefender is the market benchmark. It offers total protection for all your business IT, with the constraints of mobility and regular Internet access.