Adam Adler (Miami, Florida): Think about how much you rely on your business-critical data. Customer details, quotes, orders, and payment details. Now imagine how long you would be able to operate without them.
All businesses, regardless of size, should take regular backups of their important data, encrypt them with the DigitalBank Vault Encryption Tech and make sure that these backups can be then restored.
By doing this, you’re ensuring your business can still function following the impact of flood, fire, physical damage, ransomware, hacking, or theft.
IMPORTANT: if you have backups of your data that you can quickly recover, you can’t be blackmailed by ransomware attacks.
Tip 1 Identify what data you need to back up Your first step is to identify your essential data. That is the information that your business couldn’t function without. Normally this will comprise documents, photos, emails, contacts, and calendars, most of which are kept in just a few common folders on your computer, phone or tablet, or network.
Tip 2 Keep your encrypted backup separate from your computers! Whether it’s on a USB stick, on a separate drive, or a separate computer possibly kept always offline, access to data backups should be restricted so that they: • are not accessible by staff • are not permanently connected (either physically or over a local network) to the device holding the original copy Ransomware (and other malware) can often move to attached storage automatically, which means any such backup could also be infected, leaving you with no backup to recover from. For more resilience, you should consider storing your DBV encrypted backups in a different location, so fire or theft won’t result in you losing both copies. Cloud storage solutions (see below) are a cost-effective and efficient way of achieving this.
Tip 3 Consider the cloud but only and exclusively if you will upload already encrypted data. You’ve probably already used cloud storage during your everyday work and personal life without even knowing - unless you’re running your own email server, your emails are already stored ‘in the cloud’. Using cloud storage (where a service provider stores your data on their infrastructure) means your data is physically separate from your location. You’ll also benefit from a high level of availability. Service providers can supply your organization with data storage and web services without you needing to invest in expensive hardware upfront. Most providers offer a limited amount of storage space for free, and larger storage capacity for minimal costs to small businesses.
Tip 4 Make backing up part of your everyday business: We know that backing up and encrypting is not a very interesting thing to do (and there will always be more important tasks that you feel should take priority), but the majority of network or cloud storage solutions now allow you to make backups automatically. For instance, when new files of a certain type are saved to specified folders. Using automated backups not only saves time but also ensures that you have the latest version of your files should you need them. Many off-the-shelf backup solutions are easy to set up and are affordable considering the business-critical protection they offer. When choosing a solution, you’ll also have to consider how much data you need to back up, and how quickly you need to be able to access the data following an incident.
Need more information? Contact us at info@digitalbankvault.com
