Living on the Digital Edge: Laptop Fleet Protect

While designing a data backup and disaster recovery plan in an organization, it is usually configured for nodes that are connected within the network, generally the servers and the workstations. Any data that is distributed out of the network, or living on the fringes of the network, very rarely gets covered or never covered in the disaster recovery plan. IBM estimates that up to 60% of the data in an organization is sitting “on the edge of the network” or on the “nodes that move in and out of the network”. These include laptops, mobile devices, even branch offices, which are usually not included in the central disaster recovery plan. As a result, remote user data is vulnerable, to data loss.

The data created and used by your remote team is on the very edge of your network. As such, it is often outside the reach of your central backup. Protecting the digital assets within this fleet is a unique challenge requiring a dedicated solution.

Some of the advanced features which you should scout for in a disaster recovery plan, to protect the data on your network’s edge are:

Continuous Data Protection

Your files should get 24×7 data protection through Cloud Sync.  All your files should be backed up whenever you make a slightest modification in them.  Every new version of your file must be backed up instantly and stored in a secured environment.  You should be able to roll back to any version of your files using time machine feature and recover the snapshot of your files and versions.

Unlimited Versioning & Archiving

Over 80% of data loss occurs due to accidental deletion.  Your backup provider should ensure that it will keep every version of every file forever until you want to remove it.  While most online backup systems will delete a file from your backup when you delete the file on your laptop, a proper backup would mean that only the user who created the file should decide when to delete it.  Your data should be kept safe until you decide to delete it. This is needed as an ideal solution for any business that’s required by law to retain all their old data.  Importantly, all this solution (ideally) should be provided free of cost to the customers.

Data Compliance – the Online Backup way

Healthcare/Legal/Financial industry verticals have one thing in common: they work with huge volumes of mission-critical proprietary data, that they preserve and update all the time. It is very easy for businesses to lose data through accidental deletion, or even through malafide activities. Businesses are extremely vulnerable when they lose critical data files. The loss of valuable information can cause enterprises to lose millions of dollars worth of business and affect business continuity. 7 out of 10 small firms that experience a major data loss are out of business in one year.

You have decided to backup your company data. The next question would be where will you backup and who will you trust to protect your data? Confidentiality of your data is critical. No companies would like their information available to anyone outside the organization, especially if it is organizations dealing with medical, legal or financial markets. Your business will need some robust data protection mechanism where the data gets encrypted before it leaves your system and stored in a format, which only you can access. Let’s see the different industry verticals and how online backup addresses them.

Backup Healthcare Markets:  HIPAA Compliance

When you outsource your data to a trusted third party online backup solution provider, you must ensure that they have a framework in place to comply with HIPAA regulations. HIPAA (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) defines rules and regulations on privacy and security practices of health care information.

A HIPAA compliant online backup provider should encrypt the data before it is sent over a secure SSL connection to the server, so that the data is not accessible to anyone – not the backup provider, or employees who are not authorized to access the data.  The backup provider must also ensure that the local backup which is taken is also encrypted prior to transmission to the remote systems. An effective solution in this case would be to devise an Encryption Key, which will be generated by the customer and is kept confidential only to the customer.

Online Backup – the Digital Age Locker

We are in the midst of a digital age transformation.  Our lives are ingrained in a digital universe, where our most personal information -from photos/videos to important financial records, music files, contact information, or online communications, everything has become digitized.  As a consequence, it has become a necessity now that all these information be protected and backed up, and made available when required, in real time.  Data loss is a fact of digital life. It can happen anytime, even now.  It could be due to natural disaster like floods or fire; or it could be due to failed hard disk drives or data getting corrupted through malware, or accidentally deleted.  A data loss in a home PC can end up with user losing all the contact information, photos, key financial records and music stored in the disk.  A data loss in a small business or enterprise can have a serious impact on their millions of dollars worth of business and thus affects business continuity.

Backup Solutions

Backup industry was established to address all these issues.  Traditional backup methods relied on tapes as a medium to store the data, but it was difficult to maintain, expensive and restoring the data proved to be a complex process.  Storage process then shifted its gear towards CD-ROMs, DVDs, and external hard disks.  Since most of these backup devices were stored in the same location along with PCs they backed up, the chances of data getting destroyed with local floods or fires, or other forms of malafide data breach were higher.   With the emergence of high speed internet services, online backup solutions became a popular and easier method of backup.