Tornadoes, hurricanes, and fires aren’t the only things that can forcefully rip data out of your business. Data loss can happen to any business, at any time, for a variety of completely random and entirely “everyday” reasons.
Here are 4 everyday situations that will play the most magical disappearing act on your data.
Accidents
Unfortunately, the human element can do a lot of damage to your data… and it’s not always done on purpose. Accidents happen all the time. And when it comes to your technology – and your data – accidents happen more than all the time.
While you can’t exactly tell everyone they aren’t allowed to make mistakes, you can provide your employees with training to minimize the prospect of on-the-job data accidents. For example, train them on the negative impacts of data loss, how to avoid data loss, and what steps to take if data loss is encountered. Do this, and your employees are more likely to keep data loss top-of-mind and avoid the situation altogether.
Angry Employees
You may or may not be the kind of person that assumes their employees are out to steal from them, but this is definitely a potential scenario for data loss.
You fire someone, and they delete information from your database before you have a chance to change their credentials. Or an employee is denied a promotion, so they tamper with your contacts and mess with your documents. Both are situations that can easily happen to any company, of any size. But thankfully, there are simple ways you can avoid the data loss that could potentially stem from a vindictive employee.
For starters, you need detailed processes set in place that determine how network access and rights are handled before, during, and after employee terminations. And while we’re on the subject of network access, you should always be extremely careful with who you decide to give access to and why. Not everyone in your building needs access to everything.
Secondly, if your data is backed up, then data changed can easily be changed backed. While it’s not an ideal situation to need to recover lost data, it is better than not having the ability to recover it at all.
Lost or Stolen Devices
Again, it’s that human element that will get you every time. Lose a device or get one stolen, and this could end very badly for your business and all its data.
How many times in your life have you lost something? And how easy is it to set something down, walk away, and forever forget where you set that something down?
Well, when this happens to a phone, tablet, or laptop, it can and probably will result in lost data… because when you lose a device, you also lose everything that’s on it, too.
What about theft? If your employees work on-the-go a lot, this probably means they store data on their mobile devices. And if someone was to steal one of these devices, they could potentially gain access to all the data stored on it. That has “data breach” written all over it.
And again, you can’t exactly tell your employees to never have their devices stolen. They don’t want that to happen just as much as you don’t want it to happen. However, there are simple ways to minimize the impact of a lost device.
Thanks to gadget-tracking apps and software like Prey and Lookout, you can track lost devices and remotely wipe the data on those devices. This way, if your device is stolen, you can make sure the thief never taps into anything that’s on the device. Sure, at the end of the day, the device might still be stolen, but at least everything that’s on it isn’t stolen, too.
Malware
Whoops. Opened the wrong email? Downloaded the wrong attachment? Clicked the wrong link? That’s okay. Happens to the best of us. But unfortunately, your data won’t be too happy about that.
It’ll be corrupted, stolen, or encrypted before you even have a chance to hit the back button. So to ensure you’re prepared for a situation of this caliber, here’s what you need:
- A modern, multilayered security approach that keeps the threats out
- A dedicated resource for IT support to help you minimize data loss and downtime
- A comprehensive data backup solution to ensure your data is fully redundant and recoverable
- A strategic plan for internal cyber-security training and consistent upgrades, updates, and monitoring
Data loss is a situation that can and will happen to anyone, from any business, of any industry. This is why it’s so important to hold regular staff trainings and to enforce clear guidelines, to help mitigate these types of risk.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can keep your data safe from everyday disasters, then give us a call today! We’d be happy to answer any questions you may have.
