Tomorrow is April 1, 2011. Yes that’s April Fool’s Day and today is World Backup Day. The goal of this day and site is to bring awareness to the need for people and businesses to backup their data. It’s also about data security and the value of your business. The last joke you want to hear on April Fool’s Day is my data is gone.
Information is the most important and valuable asset to you and your business. Today most of our information is electronic and sitting on hard drives. Unfortunately most hard drives are prone to failure, so we need to backup our data. This sounds simple and logical, but how many people do this routinely?
If you are a medium or large size business, I’m sure you are backing up your data nightly. Are you? If you are a small business or sole proprietor, you may not be. Too many individuals and businesses are lax about keeping their data backed up on a regular basis. If you are doing it, where are you storing it? Do you have redundant backups? Have you tried to recover your data and restore it?
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A lot of information security leaks are attributed to insider threats. Just look at Wikileaks and the US government. An Army private copied thousands of documents onto a CD and walked out the door with them. This may be an extreme case, but is becoming more common.
A lot of data and document security issues are due to the oops factor; we do it accidentally or unknowingly. Most of us don’t willingly comprise our company or personal security, but sometimes it happens because of a lack of knowledge. I think a lot of this can be traced to insufficient training. Most companies just assume that everyone knows how to operate a computer safely.
If a new CRM system comes in, everyone gets trained on it. What about email, Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, instant messenger and a browser? What about basic computer security? Most people are just expected to figure it out on their own. How many times have you accidentally hit a key or clicked and something happened that you didn’t expect? And if it did, you weren’t sure how to undo it?
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This week Health Net, a health insurance provider to about 6 million people in the US, came clean on a data breach that occurred 2 months ago. According to the company, it lost nine server drives from its California data center on January 21, 2011. Those drives contained the data of 2 million customers, employees and health care providers. Information included names, addresses, health information, Social Security numbers and possibly financial information.
IBM, which manages Health Net’s IT infrastructure, informed Health Net management on January 21, 2011 of the potential data breach. It was only this week that the company started notifying affected people. This could be the most serious health care data breach since 2008, when the University of Utah lost backup tapes with records of 2.2 million people. To add insult to injury, Health Net had another security breach in May 2009, when they lost a portable disk drive containing the medical and financial data of 1.5 million members.
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Here’s another great video about document and information security. How many times has this happened to you on an airplane or other public place? You can get security screens for your laptop to make sure no one can read what’s on the screen. It’s also a good idea to lock your laptop when you leave it.
Information is the most important and valuable asset to your business. Without it, you are just a bunch of people who get together to talk (or email or tweet or ____). Once you develop, use and maintain a common set of knowledge, processes and expertise, you create intellectual property that is valuable. Whether that information is the specs on machine tools or the source code for your next software application, if you lost it, you’re business could be in jeopardy.
Information exists in many places. You write it on paper, it’s stored electronically in documents and files, it’s in databases and it’s in people’s heads. Most of it is in electronic documents, since this is how we maintain the collective knowledge of our organizations. We used to be storytellers, but then we started writing things down so we could remember and pass them on. With so much critical information inside businesses, there is too much to remember without writing it down.
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