Securing Your Digital Assets: Why It's Important to Protect Your Data

Posted 25th April 2023

Data loss has been an issue since the days of floppy disks – it's not a new phenomenon. However, effective data backup is vital, with 140,000 hard drive crashes occurring in the US every week and an estimated 20% of small businesses suffering data loss due to a significant disaster every five years. 

With technological advances, data backup has now evolved into data protection. It is no longer enough to simply 'back up your data' - it needs to be protected from the growing number of cyber threats that pose a risk to small businesses. 

Such threats include data centre outages, ransomware, supply chain attacks, and misconfigurations. To ensure your data remains secure and accessible, data protection must be a key consideration in your company's IT backup and recovery strategy.

There are several key features that every Data Protection Backup System should include. These are:

• Ransomware Prevention: It's essential to ensure that your data backup solution has built-in protection against ransomware, which will help to restrict automated file changes.
• Continuous Data Protection: Ensure that your system backs up files as users make changes, rather than on a set schedule, i.e. overnight – this will help to minimise data loss.
• Threat Identification: Seek out backup services that proactively scan for malware in new and existing backups to stop sleeper ransomware and other threats in their tracks.
• Zero-Trust Tactics: Implement security measures such as multi-factor authentication, distinct file and folder permissions, contextual authentication, and verification of permissions for file changes.
• Backup Redundancy: Choose a cloud backup provider that mirrors your data to another server to prevent data loss in case of server crashes, natural disasters, or cyber attacks.
• Air Gapping: For highly sensitive data, consider a backup solution that keeps a separate, offline copy of your data on a different server, disconnected from external sources.

Ensuring that your IT backup process is robust enough to account for today's cyber threats is crucial. It can sometimes take time to understand precisely what you must do to protect your data appropriately. Contact us for an informal chat if you need help with secure backup and data protection solutions.