When you take a look at the top businesses in the world today, there’s one thing you’ll discover: they all take data-driven decisions. This is not a coincidence. Instead, it is a pointer to the fact that data is vital to businesses, regardless of the scale. It should be protected by any means necessary.
In this article, you’ll learn about five ways to protect your business data. There are many ways to do this, but these tips are quite essential.
They are:
- Do a Security Audit
- Do Frequent Backups
- Protect Against Malware
- Implement Role-based Access Control
- Dispose Data Properly
Do a Security Audit
As a business grows, it gains access to more data. So it gradually becomes difficult to keep track of how much data is really available. It also becomes difficult to know what data is still valuable and should be tightly-guarded.
By doing a security audit, you can know the data that is pivotal to your business. Such that backups are easier to plan, and security strategies can be implemented more effectively.
Do Frequent Backups
There are a lot of causes of data loss. From natural disasters to human errors, to security attacks. Hence, it is near impossible to avoid these causes. But there is one thing you can control: how much data you back up.
Backup applications used for VMware backup make it easier to do create data replicas and also restore them. You should consider backup restoration to be as important as backup creation. What is the benefit of a backup that doesn’t work? In fact, that could cause more damage. Therefore it is important to do frequent backups and also restore them too, to affirm that they work as you expect.
Protect Against Malware
Backups are important, but when it comes to data, unauthorized data access can prove to be as disastrous as data loss. If malware successfully finds its way into the business’s IT pipeline, fraudulent individuals can leak, sell or defame such data. In this case, the customers are impacted directly. What is a business without its customers?
It is important for your business to implement firewalls and use top-quality anti-malware tools. There are many more strategies you can put in place, which is why businesses need security experts. Sadly, many overlook this. Businesses only look for security experts when the damage has been done.
Implement Role-based Access Control
Data is used in a business’s daily operations. Employees often need access to certain information to perform their tasks. But the need for essential data increases as you go up the employee ranks. Hence, those at the lower levels shouldn’t have access to all of the data.
Your business should implement role-based access control, such that employees only access certain data based on their roles. Cybercriminals consider employees to be the weakest link. The chances of a lowly-ranked employee being the point of compromise are quite high. It is only reasonable to limit their access to data, such that when compromise happens, the criminal will only access trivial data.
Dispose Data Properly
As a business grows, some data will become obsolete will little or no chance of positively or negatively impacting the business. In such a case, data should be disposed of. What do you do when you don’t need data anymore? Simply delete? Well, that is not a secure way of disposing of data.
By simply deleting data, there are tools that make it possible to retrieve deleted data. While these tools are not created for evil, as they are helpful in retrieving data deleted by mistake, they can cause your business harm. Degaussing is one way to dispose of data, especially from your physical drives. When you use a cloud service like VMware Backup, you can also be assured that they’ll dispose of data properly when you don’t need them any longer.
Conclusion
Every business should take data protection seriously. When a business doesn’t handle data properly, it can be highly detrimental to its success. Hopefully, you’ve learned from these ways to protect your business’s data more securely and also act on it.
