Data Protection - To Backup or Not To Backup

As the technology evolves, more aspects of our daily lives intertwine with electronic devices. Most people nowadays use some form of electronic device daily and interact with them for just about everything that we do. All these electronic interactions leave a “footprint” of the person using or

interacting with and through these devices. That is the reason for the on-going emphasis of businesses to protect personally identifiable information of the consumers. These electronic footprints also represent data that could be analyzed to produce valuable information for just about any purpose. This is why data protection is vital in this increasingly electronic world.

So what do you, as a business owner, need to know about data protection? The basic step is to make a backup of your electronic data. The first questions for data backup is what to backup and how often. With the advance of data storage device, it may seem that we can backup anything and everything. That maybe true for home and small businesses. However, as your system collects more data and your information pool increases, this may not be the best way. A few things you should consider. First, how do you control the ever increasing data that are being backed up? You might want to take into consideration what information is valuable for your reports and analytics. Take some time to come up with a parameter and build your data backup and protection strategy. Another thing to consider is how to contain the increasing need for data storage. The simplest way is to increase the size and the number of storage device. If you do so at the time when your existing storage space is near capacity, you may not have the time to plan for the best strategy. Take time to plan your data storage need for the next few years and re-evaluate the need periodically. This could provide you with a more efficient system that allows for modular growth. As your data grows, the managing of the process and data analytics could become more time consuming. When possible, consider automation for every process with a way to audit these processes to ensure completion. The last thing you need to consider is the method for system recovery. Invariably all electronic devices fail. It’s not how it fails that impact your operation, it’s how you recover from a system failure. You want to treat this like a drill so that you have a way to recover quickly from a system failure. It is a good investment for you to test and verify your data recovery process periodically. This will not only validate your recovery process but also the backup process to ensure that when the real system failure occurs, you already have a proven solution for a quick and hassle free recovery.