Data Safety in a Data Center

When you are looking forward to your business’s long life and continuity you will consider every aspect of it, safety being one of the most crucial ones. This is because, if you slack here, your business will be the one to pay, and you will be stuck with the bills. You already know that your data is vital for your business and the IT department alone is not going to be enough to keep it safe and secure irrespective of how much experience they have. Before you set up your data bank, make sure you have a full proof plan to mitigate the circumstances leading up to data loos.

Let’s look at a few points which you can incorporate in your plan to keep your data safe prevent data losses.

• Do your groundwork. Understand what your business needs with respect to its data. Find out if it can be easily recovered or not. Consider possibilities like:
  • How much time it will take to replace the lost data?
  • What kind of data is most likely to be lost?
  •  In what format is the data stored?

Answering these questions will help you create a quality plan as per your business’s requirements.

• Once your ground work is in place, try to identify the possibilities where your data can be lost. Do your research on the basis of your site location (does the region get more rainfall/snowfall, possibilities of power outages etc), internal threats including personnel who have data access and so on. Be thorough with your research. Even though it’s quite impossible to consider every possibility for data loss, note down the obvious ones. When in doubt, ask for opinion especially from people who know or work around these kinds of gigs.
• Hackers are a serious threat to your data. You need to keep your system safe from them. Even if the data is deleted by a hacker, have a back up ready to take over. Remember your data is only good and safe as your back up /recovery system. Shop around for the right one and you will save yourself the disappointment.
• Do a dry run on the system that you plan to implement for data security. This will give you an idea about how exactly it will work and also will help you pin-point the glitches with the system. Once that is out of the way, you will know where to tweak it so that it gives an optimum performance. It’s always a good idea to choose a system which can be changed as per your current business needs. After choosing an apt plan for your data security, consider adopting some practices and measures which will further enforce the system more effectively.
• Treat your security as an organization with high level priority. Invest and improve the security technology to make it more efficient.
• Monitor all kind of changes (internal & external) and document every one of them. This may sound tedious, but in the long run, this will be helpful in case of a security breach or even in case of data loss.
• Understand the fact that data loss is a serious threat to your organization. .Taking measures like educating your staff, being proactive throughout and constantly upgrading your security technology will make sure that you lessen your risk of falling victim to this ‘more-common-than-you-think’ threat.

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