Do you use a computer, tablet or even a smart-phone to store important business or customer information? Assuming the answer is yes, which it is almost guaranteed to be, what would the consequences of losing access to that data temporarily be? How about permanently losing it?

It’s dangerous to assume that someone else has considered these eventualities and put a plan in place to protect against data loss for you. Your personal cloud photos, and email may well be OK?, but what about other data? What about critical business data such as the customer financial information that your business relies on?

Here are a few starting points to help reduce the risk of critical data loss.

1. Investigate and document what data your business has, what systems it’s stored on, how sensitive it is as and how business critical it is.
2. Ask the “What if?” questions. What if the application I currently use to access that data is unavailable? What if the machine I use breaks? What if I lose the only copy of that information? 
3. Make sure all your business critical data is protected by a backup process, preferably in a different location to the primary copy of that data. Preferably you’ll have two backup copies stored in different geographic locations.
4. Walk through ?a few scenarios of machines, applications, office locations and critical staff being unavailable and ask what you would do next. How would you ensure that your customers are not affected? How confident are you that a copy of the critical data is safe? Was the backup tape of the server sitting on top of the same server that just burst into flames?

Once you have decided that a process to backup your critical data is important, review that process regularly because systems change, people change and the importance of that data might change.?

It’s always best to plan for the worst but hope for the best. 

If you have any doubt, consult with an expert. As a specialist with over 16 years experience in backup, archiving and disaster recovery, Redstor is a safe pair of hands when it comes to protecting critical business data.

ISO certified for information security (ISO 27001) and quality management (ISO 9001), Redstor’s service portfolio includes:

• Online Backup – automated, scalable, secure and trusted by over 10,000 organisations
• Backup for Schools – Secure, UK-based and Capita SIMS accredited cloud backup for schools
• IT Infrastructure – bespoke and best of breed IT solutions for organisations of any size
• Cloud Continuity – Cloud-based disaster recovery that enables your critical systems to be up and running from the cloud in minutes
• File Sync and Share – secure and encrypted access-anywhere storage, file collaboration and sharing
• Endpoint Management – simple, scalable and secure cloud-based endpoint management