Why Your Business Needs a Data Recovery Policy

Data is one of the most valuable resources on the planet today. It is increasingly in the spotlight, particularly with the current Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, and with the EU’s new law, the GDPR soon coming in to play. It is essential that any modern business understands the implications of the data it holds, how it can best secure it, and how it can be recovered should something go wrong.

You wouldn’t leave any of your other valuable assets exposed and uninsured, so why your data? It is trivially easy to copy data and to back it up online and offline. There really is no excuse for a business not to secure their data in this day and age.

Don’t wait for something to go catastrophically wrong though. Instead, formulate a data policy now so that you have it in place and ready for when the inevitable occurs. In this article we take a look at why this simple, yet effective policy needs to be in place for any business.

What Causes Data Loss?

There are a number of different scenarios that might result in you losing your data. Physical damage to hard drives or other storage mediums will make data difficult to access, if not irretrievable. Accidentally deleting a file from a computer is easy enough to do, in most cases it is also very easy to undo an accidental delete. However data loss occurs, the best preventative measure is always the same – backup.

For a business to lose data permanently, this can have some very serious repercussions for the business’s future. In some cases, not handling sensitive data correctly can lead to fines and other legal problems.

How Does Data Recovery Work?

We get it, backing up is easy, but most of us don’t do it. It’s one of those things that we always plan on doing, or we become complacent about because we are so used to cloud services saving all our stuff for us. Data recovery refers to a variety of methods that can be used to pull data off a hard drive or other storage medium, after it has apparently become lost or corrupted.

When many people think of data recovery, they begin to picture a forensics lab and a bunch of coders sat at computers pouring over data. In reality, data recovery usually involves using software that can see all the files currently on a hard drive. When you delete a file, the data itself is not removed. Instead, your computer marks that space on the hard drive as being free again, meaning it can be written over in the future. Until this overwrite happens however, the data remains there.

Why You Need a Policy

There a number of free data recovery programs which can help you with most home accidents and other personal issues. However, for more problematic or specialist cases, a professional data recovery service is needed. It is important that your workers know what to do when they think data loss has occurred. As stated above, usually you have until the computer actually overwrites data to be able to retrieve it. The quicker you act, and the more your workers know, the better. This article by securedatarecovery.com is a good starting point for devising your policy.

Any modern business needs a data recovery policy. Businesses today are dependent on digital files and data, if not for their day to day operations then certainly for their admin.  It is important that you take action sooner rather than later.