4 Tips for Protecting Your Business Data

If your business operates online in any capacity, then you have data that must be protected. Whether it’s personal data relating to your business or information directly from clients, you cannot let it fall into the wrong hands.

To achieve this, you should learn how to implement data resiliency. This means making your business data available for use no matter what the circumstances of your network or what disruptions may be occurring.

Data resiliency is incredibly important because it prevents your business from incurring costly losses. It also is crucial for your customers to trust you with their data. Without data resiliency, you put yourself and your customers at risk every time you send data through your network.

This is the last thing you need, so we’ve got some great tips to help protect your crucial business data below.

Emphasize Good Cybersecurity Practices

To start, your business should emphasize good cybersecurity practices. This means ensuring every employee that uses your network and interacts with data in any way should be following rules to ensure data safety.

In particular, you should keep a list of who is using the network (and what they should be interacting with), use encrypted forms of communication, keep strong passwords, and instruct employees on common scams to avoid.

Ensuring data resiliency requires that everyone on your team is on board. All it takes is one person to make a minor mistake like opening a phishing email to leak crucial data.

This is why good cybersecurity practices must be a priority. When your team is informed, mistakes become far less likely and your data becomes safer.

While good cybersecurity practices like these won’t necessarily help you retrieve your data, they help you keep it secured and prevent needing to retrieve it in the first place. It is far better to have a proactive defense that prevents intrusions rather than waiting for an attack and patching up later!

Frequent and Varied Backups

While having strong cybersecurity is an excellent defense, you want to be prepared in case data loss does somehow happen. The best way you can do this is to create frequent and varied backups for your data.

When you back up your data frequently, there is less you have to lose. Say that data loss occurs on a Thursday and your last backup was on Monday. That’s far more data to lose than if you backup your data daily or even more regularly.

In addition to this, backing up your data in multiple locations is also key. Specifically, you are safest if you have a digital backup in the cloud and a physical backup on a storage drive. This way you have an additional backup should one of those two become compromised. 

The most important element of data resiliency is your ability to bounce back after data loss. The more diligent you are about keeping frequent backups in multiple locations, the more resilient your data becomes.

Monitor the Network

Another fantastic tactic to make your business data resilient is to monitor the activity of your network. Data back-ups are good for replacing lost data, but you won’t know you need to access your back-ups until you are aware that data loss has occurred.

This is where monitoring the network is helpful. By keeping a close eye on traffic, you can detect when data loss occurs and stop it from spreading. The sooner you are aware of an attack or breach, the quicker you can limit its reach and prevent further loss.

You can also be proactive about how you monitor the network. Actively scanning and searching through to see if you have any security risks or weaknesses can give you time to address them before they are exploited.

The good news is that RMM software (remote monitoring and management) means that even network assets and infrastructural elements that aren’t located on-site can be taken under your wing with ease. This is yet another reason to recommend remote work setups for entire organizations, as there’s no need to compromise on security if the right tools are in play.

It is also important to ensure your network software is fully up to date. Outdated software has a higher chance of being exploited due to cybercriminals having more time to assess its weaknesses. The more updated your network, the more secure it becomes.

When you watch the traffic of your network and proactively prevent attacks, you greatly increase the safety of your data. No single technique alone can protect your data, but using an approach that incorporates multiple strong strategies will keep your data best protected.

Implement a Digital Solution

With all of this in mind, data security is undoubtedly one of the most important requirements of operating a network. The glaring concern here is how you can make this happen when a network is virtual and it can be hard to keep an eye on everything.

Fortunately, digital solutions can be used to effectively manage and protect your data without constant micro-management from you. In particular, you’ll want solutions such as virus protection software, automatic network monitoring, and data encryption.

To make this easier, you can always opt for a cloud service that manages all of these tasks for you. This allows you to focus entirely on operating your business without ever needing to worry about data safety or recovering from loss.

Closing Thoughts

That data your business works with is sensitive and ensuring its privacy will protect you and your customers. This starts with taking data safety seriously and being intentional about how you operate on your network.

While it isn’t hard to experience a data loss, you can nearly eliminate any chance of it happening if you have a good plan in place. You can make this happen by emphasizing good cybersecurity practices within your business and ensuring all employees are onboard.

In addition, you should back up your data at least daily and have both a digital and physical copy. Monitoring the network and being proactive about addressing weaknesses will also greatly protect your data. You can use digital solutions or a cloud provider to tackle these issues effectively.

The worst time to take data safety seriously is after the loss has already occurred. You need to get ahead of cybercrime and data loss by implementing an effective plan to keep your data secure and resilient. This will keep you prepared for whatever your business might face.