The cloud has made data security more important than ever. It has made it easier, but that has not stopped many companies from getting their data deleted or stolen. It is more important than ever to have a plan for keeping your data safe. You need a master data management system that can work in almost every situation. Since the world is getting more digital, data will become an evermore increasing part of doing business and our lives.
Keep Multiple Backups
One of the most important things you need to do to minimize the chance of losing your data in the cloud is to always keep many backups of that data. No matter how big it is, you need to have data backups that you can easily restore. Even a large service like Amazon can go down. In fact, it went down a long time ago, and that resulted in millions of dollars in productivity cost and data loss for companies. You need to take control of your data if it is to be safe and secure all the time. You also want to have multiple backups because you never know when something will happen to one of the servers the data is stored on. By being smart, you can minimize costs while keeping great backups of your valuable data.
Have Standardized Data Protection Policies
Data protection should be a policy in your business. It shouldn't just be something that is added on at the last moment. Your employees and partners need to master data management to keep your information as secure as possible. The easiest way to do that is to start setting access policies based on your employees. You should also start classifying data based on how essential it is. For example, certain data should never be backed up to the cloud, and you should have a separate policy governing how to keep that data safe. You should also have a policy of securing that data and standardizing the type of encryption you will want to use.
Secure Your Passwords
One of the biggest ways that people lose data is through getting hacked. However, the majority of hacking happens when someone is able to guess your password. It is not as dramatic as in the movies. The majority of people use the same password on all of their websites. If one gets hacked, then every single website is then vulnerable. The easiest way for you to make sure that this hacking never happens in your workplace is to set a policy for passwords. That includes having the password be of a certain length and include certain characters. That will help make sure that the passwords are as strong as possible. It is also a good idea to force workers to change passwords every 30 days or less. Only a few computers should have access to the cloud, and you might also want to keep an air gap between your data backups and Internet-facing computers. That way, no one will be able to get access to your backups without physical access to the server.
Monitor Everything
Even with detailed policies, you might still be faced with problems. An easy way to solve this is to make sure you know exactly what is going on at every moment. That means being able to monitor all the computers in your network. You should also be monitoring the backups and what is happening in the cloud. You can monitor who is accessing the data at a given time. You can also use this information to revoke access when things seem suspicious. Having a dedicated system administrator do this will help keep your data safe and secure. It is also a good way of fixing data problems as quickly as possible.
Conduct a Security Audit
No data protection policy is perfect. That is where a security audit comes in. A security audit is something you can do periodically to make sure that there have been no intrusions or bad staff. Internal sabotage is one of the more popular ways that businesses have data loss. By doing audits, you can identify and monitor higher-risk employees. These audits are designed to help keep your data safe and secure, and you should do them as often as possible. You can also automate the process somewhat with software.
Have Access Control for Your Staff
The law of averages says that at least a few of your staff will turn out to be unprofessional or unreliable. As a business owner, you have to be smart in figuring out which employees cannot be trusted completely. This is why access control is an important part of data management. When you can master data management, you will be able to figure out which staff is untrustworthy and revoke their access quickly and efficiently. It is also a good idea because many disgruntled employees have destroyed company data in the past. Even though you have the threat of lawsuits, it still will not bring back the data that has been lost.
Keep Data In Multiple Cloud Systems
Uploading your data on multiple cloud systems will help you keep it safe. Even a cloud system can go down. For example, the backbone cable that runs to the data center could accidentally get cut. This has happened many times, which led to Internet and data loss for an entire region. This is why you need to backup your data in as many places as possible. When you do that, you need to have a smart access control policy to make sure that every single backup is secured against all online and offline threats. Additionally, you can add encryption to ensure that even with access, someone won't be able to read your data and discover secret information.
Wrap Up
Businesses can suffer data loss at any time. However, with smart management, they will be able to keep data safe while not spending extra money.
