Data loss is crippling for any business, especially in the big data age where companies rely on digital information to refine their marketing, contact prospects, and process transactions. Reducing the chances of data loss is a vital part of a data management strategy.
The first goal should be to prevent data loss from happening in the first place. There are many reasons that could lead to data loss. Some of them are listed below:
1) Hard drive failure
2) Accidental deletions (user error)
3) Computer Viruses and Malware Infections
4) Theft of laptops
5) Power failures
6) Damage from spilled coffee or water; Etc.
However, if a loss does occur, there are several best practices you can implement to increase your chances of recovery.
Second, don’t put all your storage eggs in the cloud basket. The cloud is vital to cost-effective storage, but it has some pitfalls that shouldn’t be ignored. There have been many examples of data loss due to an employee simply dropping their computer or hard drive, so talk to staff members about best practices. SD cards are much more fragile and should never be used as a form of long-term storage.
Here’s a look at the top ways you can protect your data from loss and unauthorized access.
Back up early and often
The most important step to protect your data against loss is to make regular backups. How often should you perform backups? That depends: how much data can you afford to lose if your system fails completely? A week of work? A day at work? An hour of work?
You can use the Windows built-in backup utility (ntbackup.exe) to perform basic backups. You can use Wizard Mode to simplify the process of creating and restoring backups, or you can configure backup settings manually and you can schedule backup jobs to occur automatically.
There are also numerous third-party backup programs that may offer more sophisticated options. Regardless of the program you use, it’s important to store a copy of your backup offsite in the event of a fire, tornado, or other natural disaster that could destroy your backup tapes or disks along with the original data.
Diversify your backups
You always want to have more than one backup system. The general rule is 3-2-1. You should have 3 backups of anything that is very important. They should have a backup in at least two different formats, such as in the cloud and on a hard drive. There should always be an offsite backup in case there is damage to your physical office.
Use file and share level security
To keep others out of your data, the first step is to set permissions on your data files and folders. If you have data on network shares, you can set share permissions to control which user accounts can and cannot access the files over the network. With Windows 2000/XP, this is done by clicking the Permissions button on the Sharing tab of the file or folder’s property sheet.
However, these share level permissions will not apply to someone using the local computer where the data is stored. If you share the computer with someone else, you’ll need to use file-level permissions (also called NTFS permissions, because they’re available only for files/folders stored on NTFS-formatted partitions). File-level permissions are set through the Security tab on the property sheet, and are much more granular than share-level permissions.
In both cases, you can set permissions for user accounts or groups, and you can allow or deny various levels of access, from read-only to full control.
Password protected documents
Many productivity applications, such as Microsoft Office applications and Adobe Acrobat, will allow you to set passwords on individual documents. To open the document, you must enter the password. To password protect a document in Microsoft Word 2003, go to Tools | Options and click the Security tab. You can require a password to open the file and/or make changes to it. You can also set the type of encryption to be used.
Unfortunately, Microsoft’s password protection is relatively easy to crack. There are programs on the market designed to recover Office passwords, such as Elcomsoft’s Advanced Office Password Recovery (AOPR). This type of password protection, like a standard (non-bolt) lock on a door, will deter would-be casual intruders, but can be bypassed by a determined intruder quite easily with the right tools.
You can also use compression software such as WinZip or PKZip to compress and encrypt documents.
Use EFS encryption
Windows 2000, XP Pro, and Server 2003 support Encrypting File System (EFS). You can use this built-in certificate-based encryption method to protect individual files and folders stored on NTFS-formatted partitions. Encrypting a file or folder is as easy as selecting a check box; just click the Advanced button on the General tab of your property sheet. Please note that you cannot use EFS encryption and NTFS compression at the same time.
EFS uses a mix of asymmetric and symmetric encryption, both for security and performance. To encrypt files with EFS, a user must have an EFS certificate, which can be issued by a Windows certificate authority or self-signed if there is no CA on the network. EFS files can be opened by the user whose account encrypted them or by a designated recovery agent. With Windows XP/2003, but not with Windows 2000, you can also designate other user accounts that are authorized to access your EFS-encrypted files.
Please note that EFS is for protecting data on disk. If you send an EFS file over the network and someone uses a sniffer to capture the data packets, they will be able to read the data in the files.
Use disk encryption
There are many third-party products available that will allow you to encrypt an entire drive. Full disk encryption locks everything on a drive/partition and is transparent to the user. Data is automatically encrypted when written to the hard drive and automatically decrypted before being loaded into memory. Some of these programs can create invisible containers within a partition that act like a hidden disk within a disk. Other users only see the data on the “external” drive.
Disk encryption products can be used to encrypt removable USB drives, flash drives, etc. Some allow the creation of a master password along with secondary passwords with lesser rights that you can give to other users. Examples include PGP Whole Disk Encryption and DriveCrypt, among many others.
Make use of a public key infrastructure
A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a system for managing public/private key pairs and digital certificates. Because keys and certificates are issued by a trusted third party (a certificate authority, either an internal one installed on a certificate server on your network, or a public one, such as Verisign), certificate-based security is stronger. .
You can protect data that you want to share with another person by encrypting it with the intended recipient’s public key, which is available to everyone. The only person who will be able to decrypt it is the holder of the private key that corresponds to that public key.
Hide data with steganography
You can use a steganography program to hide data within other data. For example, you can hide a text message inside a .JPG graphics file or an MP3 music file, or even inside another text file (although the latter is difficult because text files don’t contain much redundant data that might be replaced with the hidden data). message). Steganography does not encrypt the message, so it is often used in conjunction with encryption software. The data is first encrypted and then hidden inside another file with steganography software.
Some steganographic techniques require the exchange of a secret key and others use public/private key cryptography. A popular example of steganography software is StegoMagic, a free download that will encrypt messages and hide them in .TXT, .WAV, or .BMP files.
Protect data in transit with IP security
Your data can be captured as it travels across the network by a hacker using sniffer software (also called network monitoring or protocol analysis software). To protect your data in transit, you can use Internet Protocol Security (IPsec), but both the sending and receiving systems must support it. Microsoft Windows 2000 and later operating systems have built-in support for IPsec. Applications do not have to be aware of IPsec because it operates at a lower level of the network model. Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) is the IPsec protocol used to encrypt data for confidentiality purposes. It can operate in tunnel mode, for door-to-door protection, or in transport mode, for end-to-end protection. To use IPsec on Windows, you must create an IPsec policy and choose the authentication method and IP filters to use. IPsec settings are configured through the TCP/IP protocol properties sheet, on the Options tab of TCP/IP Advanced Settings.
secure wireless communications
Data you send over a wireless network is even more subject to interception than data sent over an Ethernet network. Hackers don’t need physical access to your network or your devices; anyone with a wireless-enabled laptop and a high-gain antenna can capture data and/or break into the network and access the data stored there if the wireless access point is not configured securely.
You should send or store data only on wireless networks that use encryption, preferably Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), which is stronger than Wired Equivalent Protocol (WEP).
Use rights management to retain control
If you need to send data to others but are concerned about protecting it once it leaves your own system, you can use Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) to control what recipients can do with it. For example, you can set rights so that the recipient can read the Word document you sent but cannot change, copy, or save it. You can prevent recipients from forwarding the emails you send them, and you can even set documents or messages to expire at a certain date/time so that the recipient can no longer access them after that time.
To use RMS, you need a Windows Server 2003 server configured as the RMS server. Users need client software or an Internet Explorer plug-in to access RMS-protected documents. Users who are assigned rights must also download a certificate from the RMS server.
