Every business has trade secrets. It may not be the stuff of corporate espionage. But there are things associated with how you do business that you would rather others not know. It need not be illegal nor nefarious in any way. It could be anything from your 11 herbs and spices to your method for how you select locations for your lemonade stand
The most obvious reason to prioritize data safety is to protect your trade secrets. Among those trade secrets worth protecting are:
- Salaries and compensation packages
- Unannounced projects
- Component pricing
- Focus group results
- Anything else that provides someone else a competitive advantage
When information does leak, you will need a data recovery company. They can do more than help you retrieve data that has been deleted from a device. They can also backtrack text messages, phone logs, and other places where there may have been an unauthorized exchange of data. Protecting trade secrets is just one reason to make data safety a top priority. Here are a few others:
It Is Not Just Your Data at Stake
It’s not just businesses. Everyone needs to prioritize the safety of the data stored on their devices and on their social media accounts. That is because we are not just dealing with data that exclusively belongs to us. If you take a photo of you and a friend in a moment of indiscreet revelry, you need to think twice about displaying it. That is because it is not just you in the picture.
This is even more true for data kept by a business. If your business collects user data, you should know that it is very valuable to thieves. And it is much easier to get that data from you as opposed to getting it from individuals.
It is not just credit cards and social security numbers. There are many pieces of identity information thieves can use to do bad things to your clients. You would be shocked at what an identity thief can do with a physical address, a phone number, the name of your bank, your mother’s maiden name, your login to any account, etc…
You can say that it is bad password hygiene. But a large percentage of the people who use a password on your site will use that same password for other accounts such as their bank. But a thief will not try to get past the bank’s security. They will target your business as it will have less security. So just remember, it is not just your trade secrets that matter. It is everyone else who has entrusted their personal information with you.
Rethink Your Storage Strategy
A Mac mini or a $400 Dell may be just fine as a home server for your Plex library. But it is woefully insufficient as a substitute for dedicated servers and the private cloud. Leasing dedicated server space is very likely the most secure thing you can do. It is maintained off-site by server professionals. It is more protected from a physical breach.
A private cloud setup will give you more control. You manage the server yourself. If you run an international business, this may be the best solution as some countries are starting to demand that data from their citizens be kept locally. Besides being more expensive, the bigger drawback may be that this sort of arrangement lends itself to backdoor access. Data safety should be your top priority because it is quickly becoming the top priority of the nation where you do business.
You Can’t Afford to Negotiate with Terrorists
If you ever give a bully your milk money, you will never drink milk again. They will just keep stealing it and keep you in a docile state of terror. That is the nature of ransom ware. It is an attack that hijacks all of your sensitive data and locks it away so that you can’t get to it. The threat is that your data will be permanently deleted or exposed to the public. The demand is that you pay the hackers in some form of untraceable currency. You can’t afford to let that happen. The solution is to keep your software current. And always keep redundant backups.
You have trade secrets. It’s not just your data. There are regulatory considerations. And paying terrorists is too expensive. These are not the only reasons to maintain data safety. But they are the only reasons you need.
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