Your Business Information IS Your Most Important Corporate Asset – Keep It Safe!

Buying something intangible is a tricky thing to grasp, but in some cases, completely necessary without even a second thought. Take insurance for example. We insure our cars, our homes – even ourselves – without even thinking. It’s just what you are supposed to do. 

Even behaviors - we lock up our cars, our homes, and our valuables if left unattended. It’s second nature.

Technology, on the other hand, is something that we as humans have been slower to protect.

We connect to public WiFi if it means better Internet access. We use apps on our phones with direct connections to our bank accounts. We walk away from our workstations without locking the screen. We leave our network-connected copiers unprotected.

All things that become direct routes into our most precious information. You can’t really hold it, or always see it, but the truth is that the data behind your personal and business operations is MORE valuable than your physical assets.

Ask yourself this question: how long could your business function if you lost access to the information you use to run it?

So why don’t you protect it?

Maybe you aren’t convinced that it will happen to you. The reality is that if you could knowingly prevent something catastrophic, why wouldn’t you?

“Insurance” for your most important assets can take the form of managed network services (to protect your data from unauthorized access) and data backup (to restore at least most of your information if you're hacked or a victim of ransomware).

Of companies that lost data for more than 10 days, 93% filed for bankruptcy less than a year later. 50% of those companies that did not have some type of data management also filed for bankruptcy immediately after the data loss.

Without backup, you have nothing.

Tapes and Hard Drives Are Not Enough

“But we backup with tapes and external hard drives,” you say. Not enough. 

That’s because 77% of companies that use tapes to backup their information also found some sort of failure with their backups.

If external hard drives are a part of your backup plan, and you are relying on a professional to recover your data once your drive fails (which they ultimately will), there is no guarantee that even they will be able to help you.

Backups, like a copilot and autopilot on a jetliner, should be redundant – storing the same data in more than one place. This is especially important if you also want to protect you data from a physical loss such as a flood, a fire, or even theft.

Bottom line – information MUST be thought of as an asset. As important an asset at the building you do business in.

If you think of your electronic files as being tangible assets, then protecting them ensures its value and will ultimately prevent its loss. Don’t leave your most important business assets exposed. Protect them with comprehensive network security. 

Ensure that you can not only recover your information, but that you can restore it in a reasonable amount of time so that your operations are not impacted. It will be of no help to you to have a backup plan that takes two weeks to restore. A lot of business can be lost in 14 days.

To learn more about how you can protect your most vital corporate asset, contact a managed network service professional today for an IT assessment today.