As a small business owner, you have plenty to think about. You need to be all things at all times, at least at the start, and this can mean that some important elements of running a business don’t get the attention they should. Data loss prevention is often one of these elements. However, once you realize just why you need to have a data loss prevention plan in place, you will probably start work on it right away – it could save your business from complete disaster. Read on to find out why such a plan is essential. The Benefits of data loss prevention
Human Error
No one is perfect, and it takes just one click or the slip of a finger on the wrong key to delete extremely important data accidentally. Even the simple act of shutting down a computer without saving the documents you had open – or forgetting you had them open in the first place – can be catastrophic, depending on what the document or file might have been.
As this website explains, one of the important elements of a data loss prevention plan is training. If everyone working in your company is aware of the mistakes that can be made and how to avoid them, and if they know the most efficient ways to use the specific programs they need to use to do their work, the capacity for human error can be reduced significantly.
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Cybercrime
It’s an unfortunate fact that some data loss occurs deliberately. Cybercriminals choose vulnerable systems to hack into, and they take the data they deem to be profitable – banking details and customer IDs for ID theft, for example. If they can’t take anything, they may well decide to corrupt the files, or at the very least leave a trojan program on your system that will reach out to your contacts, giving the cybercriminal access to many other networks.
As part of your overall cybersecurity plan, you should have a data loss prevention plan included. The plan would entail:
- How to notice if something is wrong with the system
- How your organization would handle the attack
- How you could recover your data
- How you could limit any downtime to prevent additional loss of revenue
Hardware Failure
No matter how well trained your team might be and no matter what excellent precautions you have in place when it comes to your cybersecurity, you still need a data loss prevention plan because, although you will hope it will never happen, hardware can fail. When it does, if you have no data loss prevention strategy to fall back on, you could lose everything.
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One of the best ways to implement a data loss prevention plan is to ensure you backup your information regularly. When you do this, even if you suffer any kind of hardware failure. You can still access your information, and you can still run your business. Without a backup, it might be very costly to retrieve the lost information, and in some cases, if the hard drive is corrupted, it will be impossible. A good strategy that ensures all eventualities are covered is vital.
Would you like to read more about data loss prevention-related articles? If so, we invite you to take a look at our other tech topics before you leave!
