8 Steps to protect information and ensure continuity of your business
Iron Mountain, the global leader in storage and information management, has developed some basic tips to help manage business information correctly, in their paper, digital and magnetic.”The best way a company can take is to entrust the management and protection to a specialist documentary, this will ensure total control of information which, custody should not be overlooked,” says Gonzalo Rivas.
1. Back up daily. Companies need to ensure that all your important data for business continuity have a copy that is available if the original information is lost or corrupted. Keep in mind that this information may be housed on corporate servers, but also in workstations or laptops of employees, which is often forgotten.
2. Have more than one copy support. In the field of digital files, keep a second backup guarded in a safe environment outside the company is the most effective alternative to ensure their recovery if needed. Furthermore, in relation to personal data, Article 25 of Royal Decree 994/1999 states that must be kept a backup and recovery procedures of the data in a different place to that in which the teams are computer who treat them.
3. Take care of your data support. Backups on magnetic media must be kept in a safe place under constant temperature and humidity, and in an environment as clean as possible. Many cases of data loss are caused by errors in the storage, use or manipulation of the media. For this reason, care must be taken not to use the same medium for two days. It is best to have more of an external support backup, and go alternately to ensure the quality of the recording of data and extend its life.
4. Identify important information. The entire volume of a company’s data, the volume that is considered essential for its proper functioning is around 5%. But that small percentage is critical to business operations. For example, can contain information needed to ensure business continuity following a crisis. Or you can document the legal or financial situation and preserve the rights of stakeholders in an organization. Knowing the vital documents and keep them located is essential to ensure good maintenance.
5. Know who has access to that information and how often. Some documents are only consulted once or twice a year, while others are necessary even several times a day. Not all departments, human resources, legal, purchasing, marketing, finance, access the same type of confidential information. Knowing who uses what type of documents will help your monitoring and control.
6. Assign management responsibilities. The information security should be a point to keep in mind by all departments. Even in companies where this point is the task of the archives department, they must implement security measures and backup covering the entire infrastructure. It is also prudent to ensure that the person who controls access to files is not the same that is responsible for working with them.
7. Encrypt your external digital files. When it comes to managing their external backups, even today many companies use for transport to commercial messaging without any additional protection. It is appropriate to conduct a risk analysis to determine if the cost of an encryption program offset the economic risks of a security breach, and whether any should be implemented in digital documentation, or only in the highest confidentiality.
8. Develop a business continuity plan before a crisis situation. The question to ask is: if a disaster causing loss of all my business documents. “I am sure you could recover? The data are much more than numbers, are a vital asset to the operation of your business. If you can not ensure their recovery, and do so within a reasonable time, its financial performance can be severely affected.
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