Small-and medium-sized businesses are under attack.
Hackers are increasingly targeting SMBs for cyberattacks, penetrating systems and stealing or exposing sensitive data. The costs in dollars and reputation can be significant.
That’s why it’s important that SMBs apply 5 levels of data protection to thoroughly secure the information that’s critical to business success.
The State of Cybersecurity for SMBs
The 2018 HISCOX Small Business Cyber Risk Report notes the harsh reality for small businesses:
- 47 percent of small businesses experienced at least one cyberattack in the previous year.
- 44 percent experienced 2-4 attacks and 8 percent had 5 or more attacks
- 66 percent of business owners and executives surveyed listed cyberattacks as one of their top two concerns
- The average cost for each incident was $34,600
Those sobering insights pinpoint the challenges and risks of data theft. Fortunately, there are low-cost, reliable solutions available that provide a canvass of protections for valuable data as part of small business computer support services.
5 Levels of Data Protection
Here is a closer look at the 5 fundamental layers of data protection for SMBs.
Level 1: Writing Data to Multiple Drives
You need a backup for your backup. That’s the premise behind RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks), a three-decades-old concept that remains sound today.
RAID means storing your data on multiple disk drives. In the case of a hardware failure, the data will still be available on other disks. Creating a RAID array of overlapping data also helps improve performance.
Level 2: Protect Against Deterioration
There are still many data points stored on older storage technologies, including portable hard drives, tape and even USB drives. Older storage media are more prone to corruption or deterioration. It’s another reason why redundancy is so important.
SMBs increasingly are migrating their data to cloud solutions, allowing for virtual access and backups from multiple users on any device from anywhere. You should assess the quality of the data stored on older media and choose an alternative solution to ensure continued access and use.
Level 3: Take a Picture
Snapshot backups are a way of capturing the entirety of your data, operating system and/or applications. They can be used to restore a system, server, disk or drive to a previous state. These backups take a picture of the data at a point in time.
With any backup, your SMB needs to calculate two key measures that consider the impact of a natural disaster or cyberattack that disrupts your data.
The first is your Recovery Time Objective, which is a measure of how long your business IT infrastructure and services can go before data is restored and still maintain business continuity. By contrast, Recovery Point Objective is the maximum amount of data lost your organization can tolerate. Calculating this measure allows you to determine the scope and frequency of data backups.
Level 4: Real-Time Software and Hardware Protection
Your applications, devices and users need to be protected with next-generation firewalls that monitor your system’s perimeter to detect, contain and eliminate threats from suspicious or unwanted visitors. In addition, your software and hardware should be protected by automatically updated anti-malware, anti-virus, anti-phishing and anti-spam tools.
Level 5: Offsite Solutions
You do not need to keep data backups on-premises. Offsite or cloud-based data backup and recovery services are monitored and secured with state-of-the-art technologies and processes.
At Primary Support Systems, we offer small business computer support services that include comprehensive data backup and security services. To schedule an initial no-obligation consultation about our data security and recovery solutions, contact us today.