Back IT Up
Your data is your business’s lifeblood. Whether it’s financials, customer or patient information, x-rays, or document templates and form letters; if you were to lose your data today you very well might lose your business. There are a few ways to ensure your data stays safe and recoverable:
The first way is physically. If your data is sitting on a computer at the front desk, then anyone can take that data if they gain physical access to your space. Having a server locked up in the back is a much better way to secure your data. Also, if you’re still backing up to tapes or USB hard drives there is a large chance that data isn’t encrypted and if were to fall into the wrong hands such as dropping it on your way to your car; you would be violating your customers’ or patients’ sensitive personal or health information. Lastly, if those backups are stored on site, they are not protected against disaster such as fire or flood.
The second way to protect your data is against hard drive failure. Having your data on a business class server configured with raid mirroring enables your business to survive the loss of one or more hard drives. Using Solid State Driver(SSD) instead of mechanical drives can not only greatly increase performance but is more tolerant to failure. This means that you might not even know there was a failure and can continue business until the drive can be replaced. There is a difference between fault tolerance and disaster recovery, and both are necessary for modern businesses.
The third way is with archived data and file versioning. This helps to protect against ransomware as well as accidental or intentional file deletion.
In an ideal world you would have a second server mirrored on site to your primary, one server offsite in a private colocation, and a cloud server hosted by one of the big guys like Amazon or Microsoft. Also all these would be encrypted both at rest and in transit. But having the finances, footprint, and staff to manage a solution like this is out of the reach of most small businesses.
To this end, it is my recommendation that if the ideal situation is not achievable; the most important aspect is the last option: cloud backup. I can’t stress enough how a good cloud backup service is the perfect balance between real world risk recovery and small business capabilities. If you haven’t done so recently, please evaluate your backup practices. Try recovering data and see if what you think is on that Tape / USB drive is actually on there. Think about what you do if your data was stolen, held for ransom, or destroyed. This isn’t just a good idea, in most cases it’s a small business owner’s responsibility and livelihood.
