Is your data safe, secure, available?
This week I’ve been out to a local business who asked me to come in and have a look at their data storage set up. Already, I can tell that you watch to turn over and watch something else but bear with me a moment.
As a business you need to ask yourself these question:
How important is the information I have stored on computers?
What would happen if I lost it?
Where is it saved?
Is that a safe place?
Can I get to that information at any time from any place?
This is a very important part of any business. It’s applicable to everyone from the largest enterprises down to sole traders. If you lost the information you keep stored ‘somewhere’ it could cause your doors to close in an instant.
That’s scary, right?
I went to a local business recently who have just moved premises. They’re moderately big in terms of numbers of staff, IT kit and pretty huge (due to what they do) in terms of the about of data they have stored.
When they contacted me they asked for a solution that would provide
- Data security (i.e. no one can access it unless they have permission)
- Accountability (an audit trail on who might have changed files)
- Backups daily of their data
- Data to be accessible regardless of the machine operating system (i.e. Windows PCs, Macs, etc.)
- Resilience (before I went in, they had a single USB portable hard drive with all their data on)
- Remote access to their data (for selected staff)
- Scalability (should they grow in size)
This was brilliant on their part. They’d thought hard about what they needed, recognised the risk inherent in the set up that they had and that some investment was needed to improve things.
So (don’t worry I’m not getting technical) this is what I did with their budget in mind.
- Installed some fast network storage that is mirrored
- They have 2 disks and data is always written to both disks
- So if one disk dies, they still have the data
- Set up snapshots of the data to run each day
- So should they come in one day and a file be corrupted by a virus attack, they can restore the snapshot and remove it
- Set Antivirus to run on the storage at all times
- Set up secure folders for each user and then a shared folder that they can all see
- Set these folders up for access on every machine they have
- Set up remote access for the main admin user and
- Documented everything along with recommendations for the future
I can’t bear the blogs that try and strike fear into the hearts of business folk – but all the above is something you need to ask yourself regularly. It’s all too easy to think of your business in terms of the bricks, mortar and stock. The data you have is so important to you – so please make sure it is…. (all together!)
SAFE
SECURE
AVAILABLE
If you’d like me to come along to your business and inspect your infrastructure, then just get in touch here.