A cyberattack can hit at any time and the effects can be devastating for businesses both big and small
The government shows information that almost half of businesses have been reporting cyber security breaches. Just a single attack could lead to catastrophic data loss and exposure to sensitive data. This can cause downtime and can put your customers and your data at risk.
This article can help you protect your company from data breaches, and also demonstrate how organisations can lose their data in the first place.
What is data loss?
Data loss is when your documents or systems are corrupted, deleted or unrecoverable.
Data loss can often be interchanged with a data breach, obviously it is possible for data loss to occur with no third-party involved. However, data loss frequently occurs due to a data breach by cyber criminals that can delete, download or encrypt your data.
Data loss can also occur when you attempt to unencrypt the data and the cyber criminals fail to give the information back in a usable format.
There is another term often used, however this does not mean you would lose the data, data unavailability, this refers to a power outage or if the data has been stolen.
Data loss can occur via a corruption during transfer, this could happen via a power outage, this may be recoverable if you have a suitable data backup
If you want to prevent data loss and protect your data at all costs, you need to know all the ways it can occur so you can keep your data secure. The list below covers off some of the most common ways:
- Hard drive failure
- Inadequate access control
- Viruses and malware
- Human error
- Computer theft
- Fire damage
- Water damage
- Accidental deletion
- Power failure
How to prevent data loss
Your computer faces dangers everyday, let us take a look at a few ways to prevent data loss.
Backup
One of the best defences in data loss prevention is data backups. This is especially true for ransomware. Create a data backup strategy that can protect your business by helping to recover or restore your data that has been corrupted or lost and make sure you have good backups and offline backups as well.
Once you’ve outlined a backup and recovery strategy be sure to backup on a regular basis and test your backup solution to ensure it works effectively. That way if disaster strikes, you can be safe in the knowledge your entire system and the stored data you hold is protected.
Here a few tips about data backup that’ll help you do it effectively:
- Store your data backup on a separate site.
- Verify your backup data isn’t corrupted, invalid, or incorrect before disaster strikes by conducting regular checks.
Create a Disaster Recovery Plan
Just having a backup in place isn’t enough to ensure you don’t lose data. Creating a Disaster Recovery plan is essential, this will help everyone in your business to know what to do in the event of a disaster striking.
This would minimise any data loss and get you back up and running quickly. Hamilton Group Ltd can help you create a plan for your business and ensure you have the confidence to continue.
Power Surges
A power surge or power outage can do serious damage to your business, from simple data loss to completely rendering systems unworkable. If you have an uninterruptible power supply, this can provide instant backup power and would give you a bit of time to save and close any important files and shut down your computers.
Running an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) will keep your systems running for a while, however they typically will only last a few hours or less and should not be relied upon to continue working.
Antivirus & Cyber Security
Ensuring you choose the right antivirus and firewall solution is a very important consideration when trying to protect your company data.
Malware can infiltrate your network and computer systems which can either corrupt or steal sensitive information, this can lead to data breaches. Consider that personally identifiable information can leak out, covering employees and customers. If this happens you must notify the ICO and risks a heavy fine.
Your firewall must be configured to protect your organisation, while allowing you to continue with your business without too much intrusion.
Patch and update software
Patching should be a crucial element of any business’s data loss prevention strategy. Cyber criminals lookout for security vulnerabilities and exploit them to infect your computers or modify your data, leak sensitive information and damage your integrity.
Keeping software updated also helps protect your data from unauthorised users or attackers by fixing security vulnerabilities present in the software.
Data loss prevention – shaping cyber security solutions to you
Data loss prevention from Hamilton Group Ltd offer advanced data security and protection, making your business less vulnerable to attacks.
We offer the best cyber security solutions and can set you up with the best security to avoid data breaches and prevent data loss by attacks from cyber criminals.
HTS adds data loss prevention to avoid data loss and we build your IT infrastructure with multiple layers of security, using the most trusted names in tech to protect your business at all times.
If you’d like more information about Hamilton Groups range of data loss prevention tools and our intrusion prevention systems, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Together we can keep your data secure.
Call us on 01423 438953 or book an appointment from our live Calendar in the bottom right.
