What to Keep and What to Toss



With "Cyber Monday" upon us, we start the work week discussing the overflowing amount of data our businesses create and store day after day. As it turns out, there's a little bit of hoarder in all of us. Actually, let me rephrase that. I know I can be a bit of a hoarder, but isn't everyone? Those of you out there who stick to the "If you haven't used it in a year then throw it out!" doctrine can be excused from the group! For the rest of us, we do want to hold onto certain things of importance to us.

In business, it's necessary to have access to all your historical data both good and bad. Not the least of which is to track the numbers that helped define your organization in the good times in an effort to replicate the scenario. So at the very least, an annual evaluation of what's critical and what's not is paramount. Some of the worst offenders are individual email boxes.

Take some time in the New Year to evaluate what you need and what you don't. Then put policies in place to keep it manageable in the future. If you need backup advice, well that's a post for another day.

What happens if you don't heed the backup warning?

Not every user is this clueless, though I have seen and heard some stories over the years that aren't far from this extreme! While humorous, this cartoon does capture the abject horror many face when sufficient backups are unavailable after a failure. I already know that many of you don't backup as much as you should, because I get panicked calls that important sales, engineering, financial, and/or intellectual property data is gone.

The fact is that very few small and mid-sized businesses do much in the way of protecting individual PC data. There are some who assume the daily or weekly tape or external hard drive backup captures all that data, but too often than not the individual user stores important stuff on their local machine and doesn't replicate it to a shared network drive or folder. It is imperative to have policies in place to mitigate against that possibility.

So what is the solution? You could do one of two things. You could force all users to save everything to a network folder. This can create some consternation if that network is down and personnel can't reach their stuff. Or you could incorporate individual machine backups into your backup scheme. This is a bit costlier but can truly eliminate some hysteria later. As an organization, you have to determine  how much tolerance you have towards such an occurrence and act accordingly. Since there are several ways to go, engage your trusted technology partner in determining what the best option is for you. The old proverb is as applicable here as anywhere, "He who fails to plan, plans to fail."

When big brother says you HAVE to!



George Orwell's classic novel 1984 was a cautionary tale of a futuristic "Big Brother," and while today's government does not have video monitors on every street corner, we do have to succumb to some oversight. Any of you ever watch the news and see those "traffic cams"? In Philadelphia and other major cities the police have used both public-facing cameras and private building security cameras to see what's really going on.

Speaking of government oversight, regulations like HIPAA, Sarb-Ox, PCI, etc. means if you are a business living by these rules, you have to be diligent and prepared.

More often than not companies fail required audits because of loose IT practices or inability to recognize "blind spots" that they may not know they need to cover. Make sure you have a good resource at hand to help you understand what you need to know and seek out an independent audit of your network and associated applications. Sometimes it takes a third-party with an unbiased eye to spot trouble. We know because we have to maintain our data center in a SAS-70 qualified facility, so we at SecurElement feel your pain. If you have to have that level of protection, at least you now know where you can find it! Now is not the time to bury your head in the sand and hope you're ok.