Why comply – its a legal requirement
Keeping the information you have about your customers secure will help protect your and their information. It could also protect you against claims for damages

Good business sense
Sending out a mailing from incorrect or out-of-date records could not only annoy your customers but also wastes your time and money

Good information handling can improve your business’s reputation by increasing customer and employee confidence in you

The eight data protection principles of good information handling say that personal information
must be:

• Fairly and lawfully processed
• Processed for specified purposes
• Adequate, relevant and not excessive
• Accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date
• Not kept for longer than is necessary
• Processed in line with the rights of the individual
• Kept secure
• Not transferred to countries outside the European Economic Area unless the information is adequately protected.

Its very easy to adhere to these basic principles if you secure your data by:

Physical Security – Ensure good secure locations for your IT equipment and secure your building.
Passwords – Long, strong, with uppercase, lowercase, numbers, symbols, etc – e.g. P@5sw0rd instead of password.
Software Security – Keep your operating system (Windows) and applications are all patched and up to date.
Gateway Security – This means Firewall – get a good one to keep the badies out – I recommend SonicWALL
Secure Wireless – Do you need it? If so use strong WPA2 encryption, hide the SSID, lock it down.
Email Compliance – Filter and check emails – ensure no-one is sending out secure information.
Restrict Access & Information – Limit peoples access to information – if they can’t see it they can’t leak it!
Backup & Restore – Ensure you securely back your data regally up and you can recover it – don’t leave your backups in an unsecured location!
Encryption – If you have a laptop its highly stealable and you’re also likely to leave it on a train my mistake (this happens to Government and the public sector all the time), so encrypt it!

And after all this, if you are in doubt, speak to some experts.

The MyXerver is a very good solution which I rate highly and I’m considering purchasing myself – being used to enterprise products, its often hard to find a SOHO (Small Office Home Office) solution that will ‘cut the mustard’ at a reasonable price (i.e. cheap not to burn a hole on your pocket) and simple to use (set-and-forget – but please do TEST your backups!).

A while ago, I installed a small NAS drive on my network just for the purpose of backup, acting as a data repositry for the local PC hosts, and just needed a simple application which would copy data over my network.

I tried custom x-copy scripts, these work to a degree, but you need to “wake” the NAS drive up, etc and ensure the network is always ready – more often that not there were time-out issues, so OK if you wanted to run manually, but not so much if you wanted automation

I tried NT backup – doesn’t like finding NAS – plus NT backup is so old (written by Veritas for Microsoft all those years ago – and we’re talking a lot of years ago as NT backup is crude!).

I tried Symantec System Recovery Desktop Edition (formally LiveState) – again this didn’t like backing up to my NAS as it wanted NT file permissions (thinking it was on network!)

And then I came across Allway Sync™

Allway Sync is free (domestic use only) file and folder synchronization software for Windows.

Allway Sync uses innovative synchronization algorithms to synchronize your data between desktop PCs, laptops, USB drives and NAS / SAN type storage. Allway Sync combines bulletproof reliability with an extremely easy-to-use interface – and is very granular in how it performs.

So if you have a USB drive or a Network drive, and you want to make the most of it before considering devices such as the MyXerver, then I’d give Allway Sync a try.

So you’ve purchased your brand new PC or notebook, you have lots of new photo’s, new company logo, posters, that new flashy company website, your new marketing and sales plan, prospect database you’ve just paid hundreds of pounds for and spend the last two days customising, existing customer database, last years’ accounts closed off and archived – and it’s all stored on your shiny new notebook or desktop computer you just purchased in sales…. Made a backup of anything yet?

Backing up data is a chore – nothing’s ever going to happen to my data

Many of us are too engaged in our work to even think about backup up our valuable data until it’s all too late, it can all happen too easily – that cup of coffee you accidentally split on your laptop or your computer harddisk that has been clicking for a while has just failed at 1am in the morning, hours before your big presentation to a new client – that data is now lost forever, no way of retrieving days, weeks, maybe even months worth of work, and potentially the loss of a new customer with a pipeline of future business.

50% of businesses who suffer catastrophic data loss cease trading with 12 months (1)

So by now you’ve decided that you should consider backing up your data and a wise choice too. Most people are under the impression that backing up your data is expensive – it isn’t! For most individuals and small companies, simply saving a copy of the data each evening onto a removable USB pen drive (circa £20) or external harddisk (circa £100) is perfectly sufficient. So now you have helped to eliminate the risk that should a local problem occur such as a disk failure or your PC fails to boot up in the morning, you can sleep comfortably knowing your data has been saved somewhere. If you want to go one step further, and for complete piece of mind it is a strongly recommended you keep a copy off-site, this ‘insures’ against catastrophic loss (such as your offices collapsing, fire, theft, etc).

How much data can you afford to loose?

The best way to think about back-up is to work out how much data you / your company can afford to permanently loose, huge big corporations such as HSBC back-up every 30 seconds (30 seconds of world-wide bank transactions is worth millions of pounds), where most SME companies can afford one days worth of work loss, so most backup their servers once a night onto a removable tape which is secured off-site.

“70% of backups tested indicate either a small or large problem (2)

Backing up data is only one half of the total solution – what good is a backup if it doesn’t work. Restoring the data successfully is the other half of a complete solution. Remember that presentation you were working on until 1am when it all went wrong – because you did back it up just a few hours before, you know exactly where the DVD / USB pen / harddrive is to restore the file onto another PC ready to complete ahead of your prospect meeting tomorrow. This time round, that nightly backup chore is now worth half its weight in gold!

Remember to regularly test the data you backup – just to check it really does work, as you never know when you may need it.

Quotes & References:
(1) SonicWALL Inc – leading security & data protection products for the SME market.
(2) Networking Fundamentals Ltd – Disaster Recovery Testing Laboratory. T: 01264 721680.