7 Ways You Can Secure Your Critical Data

What if your business’ critical data gets stolen? How would you and your business be going to cope up with this? Data security is seen as one of the major issues for every company these days. Getting your critical data compromised is definitely going to affect the progress and pace of your business.

So how safe is your data? There are mainly two ways how you store your critical data.

 Cloud Servers

As a business uses a cloud server, all its data is managed and maintained remotely. The user can access all of this stored data typically via the Internet. As all this cloud data is stored physically in a data center.

You should be cautious about choosing the right cloud data storage provider for your business.

You should always consider the following factors before investing in a cloud service:

1.       How reliable are these data centers?
2.       How do these servers protect your data from theft and viruses?
3.       Where are these data centers located?
4.       How often do they back up all the data?
5.       What level of encryption does the provider offer?

On-premise Servers

As almost every on-premise server lacks security measures, which means that anyone in your office can get access to your critical files. There are several other issues with these servers as they can get physically damaged and the condition in which they are kept can affect their performance. Maintaining these servers can be really expensive as they need a dedicated temperature-controlled room. You are even required to use the latest anti-virus protection software to protect your data as well.

You should look at the following aspects while investing in these in-house servers:

1. How secure are these servers?
2. Who can get access to your data?
3. How safe are these servers?
4. What’s the status on your malware protection?
5. What are the expenses?

As your business is pretty much dependent on the critical data that is stored on these servers, you should be really careful while deciding what is the most suitable option for your data storage. It should be your top priority that all your data is safe all the time. As cybercrime is increasing rapidly it is really important that you take all the necessary measures to protect your data. 

Here are some useful tips that you should consider to prevent data theft.

1. Regular Backup Of All The Data

This is the most simple and useful step for your data safety. It may sound really simple but its importance can never be underestimated. As backing up data takes a lot of time, it might get frustrating. But still, you ought to do it regularly. There are several options that you can consider to make backup process more efficient and fast. For instance, there are several plugins that you can use to automatically backup your website’s data. You can even use external hard disk drives to store all your physical data safely.

2. Safe Backup Location

This is really important as you must keep your data safe even after all the online backups. As a business, there are several critical files that you just can’t share even with your most trusted employees. Therefore, you must save all these critical files in a safe, secure and accessible location. This way all your files will be safe and you can access them anytime. This will also ensure that your data is safe even if there’s an accident at your office.

 3. Secure Messaging Apps

As most of the personal and work-related messaging occur through free and unencrypted chat apps, the risk of theft and leakage of data is pretty eminent. This is a grave security issue as well. As any of your conversations get compromised you do face a potential risk of loss of your valuable data and money. You could be held responsible for this loss and may get fired or sued from your own company.

As a business owner, you should invest in buying an end to end encrypted messaging app. This way only authorized users will be able to communicate with each other. All data sharing will be protected by anti-virus software as well

4. Data Encryption

Encryption is a process of encoding a message or file in such a way that it can only be accessed by a user with its encryption code. Data encryption is one of the safest ways to make sure that your data remains secure and it ensures that no unauthorized person or app could misuse this data. As you encrypt your data you also minimizes the risk of exposure and increase your credibility among your clients and users as a business service. However, you should keep the encryption keys somewhere safe, as without them all this data might become useless to you as well. It is really important that you encrypt your data when you store it online as it increases data security and prevents any misuse of your data.

5. Saving Data In A Cloud Storage

No matter how much you feel comfortable by storing your data on flash drives or hard drives, these drives may stop working at any point of time. Cloud storage is currently the best option for you to save your critical files online. This way any device failure will not result in loss of any data. You can even access your data from anywhere. 

However, there are several things that you consider before storing your files on cloud. There is a limit on how much you can store online and a stable and fast internet connection is necessary for smooth processing.

 6. Network Attached Storage

NAS can be seen as dedicated storage option that allows multiple users to share data over a network connection. Users on a local area network can access this shared storage with the help of a standard Ethernet connection. You can even increase their storage limit with the help of external hard disk drives. The main downside to NASs is that they are really expensive to install and maintain. You can’t share sensitive data through this platform as well.

 7. Cybersecurity Insurance

As the rate of cybercrimes is increasing rapidly and no matter how much you invest on your data security, eventually it might get compromised. This is where Cybersecurity insurance comes in handy. It is a service that offers protection to online attacks. As you might feel that this is really expensive option for you, but in case, your data security is breached you’ll be really grateful to yourself for getting cybersecurity insurance. The insurance company even provide you with several additional tools and recommendations for your help.