There are so many potential pitfalls that can befall your company’s data and cause significant damage to your business. A good case in point—and one of the most high-profile data loss stories in recent memory—is when one of Pixar’s animators accidentally entered the wrong command and instantly deleted about 90 percent of the Toy Story 2 production files. Pretty bad, no? It gets worse. The data backup system malfunctioned due to inadequate disk space. For a brief, bloodcurdling moment, it looked like almost the entire production would be lost. Thankfully, after much blood, sweat, and tears, the crew recovered the data and restored the film files.
But not every data horror story ends well, and we have all witnessed our share of data disasters. For example, one small company backed up all its data on tape drives. The managing director would bring the current drive back to his home for safekeeping at the end of each day. One evening, he put the tape on the top of his car and drove away without noticing. The company immediately lost all its data for the previous day.
Sadly, data loss stories are an ever more common occurrence as millions of people worldwide continue to work remotely. Moving employees, devices, and data from a secure office setting to a less secure remote environment introduces many data loss risks, from human errors to technical glitches and cyberattacks.
Here are four critical steps you can take to ward off potential disasters and ensure your corporate data stays safe.
1. Never Stop Testing
Arcserve conducted a survey of IT decision-makers and found that nearly a quarter of all organizations don’t even test their data recovery plans or don’t have them in the first place. It’s vital to regularly test backups so you can be certain you can recover in the case of data loss. The last thing you want is to rely on a backup that fails during an emergency— whether it’s a cyberattack, natural disaster, or system failure.
While having a backup is essential, recovering all data completely and quickly is just as crucial for business continuity. Your organization should make it a habit to periodically test your backup copies to ensure you can reliably restore your data.
2. Embrace Multifactor Authentication
Multifactor authentication (MFA) is one of the most critical security features for protecting corporate data. With millions of passwords constantly being stolen and becoming available to attackers, many businesses are now implementing MFA to provide an extra layer of security. Adding a second authentication factor is vital for protecting your accounts and locking down your data. According to the latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, MFA is especially crucial given that 61% of all breaches involve stolen or compromised credentials.
By requiring employees to enter more than just a password to gain access to their data, you make it harder for a criminal to impersonate that employee. With MFA, a stolen password alone is not enough to gain access, so you’re putting a big hurdle in the path of cybercriminals. And cybercriminals don’t like hurdles—they want the low-hanging fruit.
3. Encourage Employees to Back Up Their Data
When employees work remotely, they probably won’t be as vigilant as they would be in the office. They’re using their home PCs and clicking on links that, perhaps, they should not be clicking on. That puts their data at greater risk. Even worse, that puts your corporate data directly at risk, too. That’s why it’s so important to encourage employees to be responsible and back up their data regularly.
You should also adopt the 3-2-1-1 data-protection strategy. The 3-2-1-1 strategy says you should have three backup copies of your data on two different media, such as disk and tape, with one of those copies located off-site for disaster recovery. The final one in this equation is immutable object storage.
4. Make Data Protection a Priority
Consider implementing a data storage solution that can protect your data from human error wherever it lives—on-premises, off-site, or in the cloud. The most effective solutions can quickly recover individual files and systems—or an entire data center—in minutes while ensuring that the data is always available, no matter what happens.
This sounds almost too good to be true, but it’s easily achievable with next-generation solutions. These solutions provide immutable object storage, providing safeguards to protect your data from human error by taking snapshots of that data every few seconds. And, because the object store is immutable, it can be restored in a snap, even if someone tampers with the data.
When it comes to your business, you already have plenty of things to worry about. With the right strategies and systems in place, data protection can be one less item on that list. Contact us to talk to a data protection expert and learn more about Arcserve’s effective solutions.
