As cyber attacks continue to rise, ensuring your data is protected is more important than ever. But what is data protection in cyber security, and how can it help protect your business? Read on to find out more.
What is data protection?
With businesses becoming ever more digital, data protection is the process by which businesses and individuals protect their most sensitive information. This includes protection from damage, loss, theft, or corruption.
Why is data protection important for businesses?
Taking data protection seriously is one of the key elements of cyber security in modern businesses. These days, the amount of data being created, used, and stored in the running of a business is higher than ever before – and is only likely to keep increasing. Therefore, ensuring this data is properly protected from malicious intent or accidental loss is of the utmost importance.
The day to day running of many businesses is also now increasingly reliant on steady, continuous data access. Experiencing a loss in data can lead to extended periods of downtime and have many negative consequences for a business and its customers.
What does data protection achieve?
The loss and corruption of data can cost businesses hugely in terms of lost revenue, and possible loss of trust with their customers if they have experienced a major data breach.
Data protection and having robust cyber security systems in place is the best way to prevent data loss before it happens. Data protection protects both you and your customers in the case of data theft, and helps businesses recover quickly from downtime in the case of data corruption – keeping the loss to their productivity minimal. It is also a reassurance to customers and potential customers to know a business cares about and practices data protection.
Different methods of data protection
Data protection is a key part of cyber protection – but it cannot be limited to just one thing. Good, robust data protection looks at the issue from several angles, and is constantly evolving to keep up with new trends and advances in technology. A few of the important elements of data protection are listed below.
Archiving and backups
An essential part of any data protection plan is archiving and backing up your data. Archiving and storing old data frees up space for you to store new and current data, but equally ensures you have extensive historic records should you need them for any reason.
Continually backing up your business’s data – ideally to a cloud backup server – is also vital to keeping your data safe. This way, in the event of data corruption or unexpected downtime, you will have up to date data ready to recover quickly.
Disaster recovery plans
Establishing backups is also part of the disaster recovery plans we create for our clients, to get their businesses running again fast, should any unexpected problems occur.
Every bespoke disaster recovery plan we create is designed to assess the risks facing a business, monitor your systems to ensure backups are being created, and work with you to decide how much potential downtime is tolerable for your business – and how quickly we can get your systems up and running again.
Compliance
Ensuring a business is compliant with the latest laws and regulations concerning data protection (e.g. GDPR) is a vital part of any security strategy,
PC Comms have attained the government backed Cyber Essentials Plus certification. Achieving this certification included an external audit of all our business policies and processes, and also a full vulnerability scan. With this certification in place, we can confidently help our customers to become Cyber Essentials certified too.
Employing the IT support services of PC Comms and becoming Cyber Essentials certified will help cyber security best practises become the norm for your business.
