Protecting your data means protecting your hardware as much as anything else. So unless you’re a celebrity who just doesn’t care about how you treat a laptop, there are some easy tips everyone should be following to protect that all-important work travel companion.

Data Protection in the News

Protecting your data isn’t a recent hot button issue, and it’s not going to suddenly fall out of vogue. If anything, the persistence of the metaverse and its proponents show that there’s really no end in sight for what the power of data can do for us – which means protecting it will only become more important as we fall down the rabbit hole. 

To keep tabs on what others are saying about this important topic, here are some of our favorite recent articles for you:

Machine as insider threat: Lessons from Kyoto University’s backup data deletion | CSO Online 

Key Takeaways: 

1. Kyoto University in Japan lost 77 terabytes of data due to, of all things, a backup error. YIKES.  
2. To prevent data loss from happening again, the university scrapped their obviously flawed backup system and plans to: 
   1. Apply procedural improvements like keeping incremental backups 
   2. Fully verify all codes prior to applying them to their supercomputer system 
   3. Conduct a full review of the damage to suggest key improvements 
   4. Re-educate staff engineers to avoid a similar recurrence of the error

Managed IT Services: The Small Business’ Security Savior | Forbes 

Key Takeaways: 

1. Businesses often feel they are simply “too small to the target” of hackers or other catastrophic data losses. The reality is considerably more grim than that. 
2. In the event of a major disaster, managed service providers can help your team resume normal business quickly, running your backups as virtual machines in the cloud and keeping any service interruptions to a minimum.
    

A recent report from McAfee cites global losses from cybercrime impacting businesses to the tune of $1 trillion in 2020, with that number nearly quintupling in the past year to $6 trillion –  a number that is still rising. Thanks to a major push to remote work spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic, cybercrime escalated as many businesses moved their people to work remotely, which opened up more potential points of attack on unaware businesses. 

1. What kind of backups should you be using?

The standard backup used across the industry, for large amounts of data at least, comes in the form of image-based backups. Image-based backups, unlike their file-based counterparts, take a “snapshot” of your computer (or “machine”) at the point in time you ask it to. File-based backups recover the same data accessed by the image-based snapshot but instead pull from a file-level backup that requires you manually reinstalling everything. 

2. How often should you backup your data?

And just like your old English teacher begging you to save early and often, saving more often is always better than less often. Consider the amount of work or information you could realistically afford to lose in the event of a disaster or breach – that’s how often you should be backing up your network at a minimum.

3. Where should the backups be stored

The last question most businesses ask our experts is where to keep their backups, and that answer comes down to a few key factors for each business – that you can read about here, in our full blog!

If you made it this far, we're guessing you see value in backing up your company data and want to learn more. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, where we are posting on the topic 3 days a week!