With data breaches on the rise, the way companies store and manage their data has been forced into the spotlight. Businesses have a responsibility to protect their documents and data, especially when consumer information is involved. Without taking the proper precautions to store all of your business documents and consumer information safely, that information is left vulnerable to a number of physical, digital and human threats.
From an internal standpoint, how you organize and manage your documents can either benefit or impede on your day to day operations, as well as how quickly your company will recover in the event of a disaster.
No matter what type of business you run, you’ll benefit from knowing these critical document storage guidelines and how to implement them. Not doing so can mean hefty financial repercussions and even the threat of a fatal mistake for the longevity of your business. Keep organization, security and recoverability at the forefront of your document storage and management system with these five essential rules. They could even be what keeps your business comfortably afloat.
Rule #1: Your document storage system is only as strong as you build it.
Documents will enter your business environment in many forms. Hard copies of paperwork, receipts, faxes, emails, PDFs, CSVs and other digital files may represent just a portion of the data your business needs to store for later use. With that in mind, it’s important to take a look at the types of information your business handles so that you can create storage guidelines for each. Without clearly defined procedures in place, important documents will fall through the cracks.
Once you create procedures for the types of information your business handles, distribute those procedures among each department in your organization. Forming your procedures is important, but without your entire staff on board your storage system will fall apart — no matter how fine-tuned. At a minimum, your storage guidelines should:
Indicate which incoming paper documents should be scanned and retained.
Provide a consistent, file naming formula to maximize ease of searchability for all files in your organization.
Designate which information requires backup, and how it should be backed up. (If it’s important enough to scan and store, it’s likely important enough to backup.)
Rule #2: Keep an up-to-date record of industry regulations.
As you create comprehensive document storage procedures, remember that how your business stores its documents and records may not be entirely up to you. Depending on your industry, you be may held accountable to certain industry regulations — as is the case in the medical and financial fields. If your business falls into one of these industry categories, there are likely rules governing retention lengths, storage type, data disposal and data transmission. As many of these governing bodies enforce fines for noncompliance, it’s in your business’s best interest to stay up-to-date on changing regulations so you can follow them and change your own internal procedures as needed.
Many times, these regulations are put into place to protect the businesses and business owners they apply to.HIPAA regulations, for instance, require medical practices securely backup retrievable, exact copies of all ePHI (electronic patient health information) to an offsite location — a requirement that protects the integrity and recoverability of patient data, which should always be retrievable in the case of a malpractice suit (among other reasons).
Rule #3: Automate backups and build in redundancy.
Storing data in one place and one place only is never a good idea. If your computer ever crashes, your server room is flooded, or an external hard drive is stolen, you’ll be sorry you didn’t backup to a secondary location. Likewise, relying on a single employee as the party responsible for running and managing all data backups is short sighted. Human error happens. One slip, one forgotten day of backup, and your company could lose an important document or file change forever.
You can avoid these storage traps by employing an automated cloud backup service with built-in redundancy. It’s best to install a cloud backup program for small businesses that will run automatically and continuously in the background, without any user input. The cloud backup provider you choose should also backup your data to redundant servers as an added layer of protection.
Rule #4: Have a cloud backup tool with strong digital and physical safeguards.
Cloud backup is the only foolproof document storage and recovery option, but it needs to have the appropriate digital and physical safeguards built-in to keep your data completely safe. If it doesn’t, it can’t be relied on to keep your data retrievable, safe from viruses, device crashes or safe from loss.
Cloud backup, also known as online backup, is used to create a complete backup of the files you select, your server, desktop or entire system. This means no matter what happens to your data, you can always recover it when you need it, exactly as it was. In this way, it’s used as both an online storage tool and a rapid data recovery solution.
In the way of security safeguards and recoverability, a quality online backup provider should:
Allow you to revert to a previous file version of your data, so you can recover past versions and deleted changes
Provide remote data recovery, so you can retrieve your data from anywhere with an internet connection
Offer end-to-end encryption so that your data can’t be read or compromised, even during transit to the cloud
Encrypt your data with either 256-bit encryption, AES encryption, Twofish, or Triple DES encryption — all commonly used by militaries, governments, financial institutions and other trusted internet service providers worldwide
Protect its data centers with multiple levels of access control (alarms, armed guards, video surveillance, etc)
Equip its data centers with uninterruptible power supplies, redundant cooling and multiple redundant gigabit internet connections so that your data will always be available when you need it, without downtime
NAS and network shared backup
Complete an annual, SSAE 16 Type 2 audit of its data centers
Provide redundant server storage for your data
Offer a 30-day risk free cloud backup trial so you can assess the service for yourself
The backup provider you select to store your data shouldn’t be an afterthought. Along with offering each of these features, your provider should offer quality customer service and have plans structured specifically for small to medium sized businesses. Nordic Backup has three Small Business Cloud Backup plans built to provide backup coverage for an unlimited number of computers — making them the perfect fit for any small business document storage and recovery need, while providing all of the security and access features you should expect in a professional level backup provider.
If your business can’t afford downtime for any reason, look for a more sophisticated, enterprise-level cloud backup plan with unlimited computer and server backup, server virtualization, managed cloud hosting, universal database backup and more included. This type of cloud backup plan will give you peace of mind in knowing that no matter what data disaster happens, you’ll always be able to pick back up right where you left off with all the information you need at your fingertips.
Rule #5: Always keep an up-to-date data loss prevention and disaster recovery plan.
No business is invincible. Natural disasters, viruses, hard drive crashes, device damage, theft, and more can strike at any time — leaving data compromised, and sometimes, lost forever. Any of these incidents can spell big trouble — creating long delays in business, lost profits, and more. No matter how you’re storing your documents, you need to have a plan of action in place in the event that any of these disasters strike. With a data loss prevention and disaster recovery plan in place, your business will be prepared to bounce back from any of these scenarios and recover the data you need to get back to business quickly.
Your disaster recovery plan should include:
Steps for recovering the data that was compromised or lost
Steps for how to react in any disaster scenario — from viruses, to data breaches and more, including procedures for when and how customers need to be notified
A list of organizations and personnel to contact to remediate the loss or attack — this may include your PR team, IT department, and regulatory agencies
An annual data security audit to test the strength of your data security safeguards and recoverability (Click here to get a free data security audit now)
Server virtualization to get your business back up and running with no downtime
Adopting these document storage rules into practice is the best way to keep your business prepared for any data loss event.
Get your business one step closer to ensuring total business continuity now by investing in an affordable cloud backup solution for businesses. No matter what happens to your documents, with cloud backup, you’ll always be able to get them back. Of all the document storage rules you should follow, you’ll be glad you followed this one.
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