When you consider potential threats to your business, emergencies like hacking, theft, and fire come to mind. However, how often do you consider the damage that a hurricane or flood might cause to your business and data?
If you live in an area with a high-risk for flooding, it’s important to begin planning for the worst case scenario. Even if you have insurance on your building or property, what about your business data?
Flooding can cause extreme damage to the physical storage devices that contain the data that your team needs to work, as well as to the equipment that they use to do that work. Here, we’re going to look at three ways you can prevent the loss of sensitive data during a natural disaster event such as flooding.
Backup Data to the Cloud
The cloud refers to a type of computing that has become hugely popular for a wide variety of reasons. Cloud computing and cloud software are essential for businesses that rely on remote teams and are a good backup for teams who are forced to work from home due to extensive flood and hurricane damage to an office space.
However, when it comes to backing up data, it’s cloud storage that is going to be the primary security for your data. By switching to the cloud, you store your vital data on a remote server that is accessed online, so it stays safe from physical threats such as flooding.
Even if a hurricane directly hits the storage devices in your office, you have a backups that you can access, download, and start working with immediately. Switching to the cloud can prevent data loss and secure your data.
Many MSPs offer cloud solutions specially customized to their customer’s needs, too, so you don’t need to worry about paying more for options that you don’t use.
Keep Physical Sensitive Data in Secure Places
If you have any sensitive data that you cannot upload to the cloud or you’d rather store physically, then you need to treat it like it’s the most vulnerable and valuable thing in your business.
Following a major data loss, most businesses do not survive for more than a year. To make sure that this doesn’t happen to your business, you should consider putting your physical storage in places that are protected against the elements.
For a lot of businesses, the only data that you cannot back up digitally are those that are stored on paper. Your papers and folders should, for that reason, be kept in a water-tight safe or, at the very least, above a waterline to prevent damage from a flood.
Of course, some business owners are not aware they are in a flood or hurricane-prone area, which can mean they don’t think too much about protecting their work assets from such disasters. However, that only makes it more essential to invest in the waterproof protection that your physical data and devices need.
Ensure Remote Working Cybersecurity
If your business experiences a major flood or hurricane, then there is a good chance that teams may work remotely for the foreseeable future. If that’s the case, then you need to prepare for the added risk of employing remote workers.
Remote workers rarely secure their connection to the cloud or other shared spaces that contain sensitive data, making them a prime target for hackers. They can inadvertently open up a weak point in an IT scope that was previously believed to be secure.
Thankfully, there are a variety of tools, softwares, applications, and other measures that will prevent a data breach. Aside from cloud solutions, which tend to be very secure, MSPs can also recommend a virtual private network (VPN).
VPNs effectively scramble the data that is being sent to and from anyone who accesses your Cloud servers. This way, even if someone were to intercept that data, it would be so scrambled that it would be incredibly unlikely they could ever figure out exactly what it means.
Of course, it’s recommended you do what you can to ensure your team takes advantage of protective measures such as professional quality firewalls and anti-malware software.
Are You Protecting Your Business from Disaster?
The three solutions above might not protect your data from every eventuality. However, they can ensure that it is kept as safe as possible during major floods and hurricanes, which are only increasing in severity and frequency.
For that reason, it’s important to take the threat of floods seriously and protect your valuable business data from damage and loss.
