Preventing data loss is paramount for two reasons. Firstly, because under data privacy regulations (such as GDPR or CCPA) businesses are required to implement “appropriate” security measures to protect personally identifiable information (PII), and secondly because keeping that data secure is important to the ongoing operations of the business.
It’s for that reason that many organizations have a data loss prevention strategy implemented into their business processes.
Yet, despite the vast majority of businesses having data loss prevention strategies in place, most security measures are focused on mitigating the risk of third-party breaches such as ransomware attacks, phishing, malware and other threats.
But there’s another threat that remains one of the top causes of data loss - natural disasters.
Rain, flooding, earthquakes, fire - the list of threats is never ending, and natural disasters pose a serious risk to your IT infrastructure and the data that resides within it. Not only do you need a data loss prevention strategy that focuses on third-party threats, you also need to take into account the possibility of data loss from natural disaster.
In this blog, we take a look at how your business can avoid data loss from natural disasters.
Avoiding data loss from natural disaster
1 - Understand where your data lives with
The first step in avoiding data loss from natural disaster is to understand what data your organization has and where it lives. A data discovery platform will scan your organization's entire environment and IT infrastructure to uncover what sensitive data you have, where it lives, and who has access to it.
When your business has a complete inventory of its data, you’ll be in a far better position to implement data loss prevention strategies that protect the data you have. You can’t protect what you can’t see.
2 - Ensure backups are geographically dispersed
It’s all well and good having backups of your data, but where are those backups located? If they are in the same area as your business, or even worse the same building, then it’s likely that a natural disaster is going to not only destroy your company’s data, but destroy your backups as well.
For large enterprise organizations, data backups may involve owning several data centers throughout the country, or even the world, to protect your data from regional natural disasters. For smaller companies, data can be backed up on the cloud and recovered from anywhere.
3 - Protect your physical infrastructure
In some cases, you may be able to prevent data loss from natural disaster by implementing systems that protect your on-site infrastructure. Devices like flood and moisture sensors, backup generators, power surge suppression systems and waterless fire suppression systems can all help to protect your hardware and mitigate the risk of damage to your physical hardware.
4 - Build a strategic disaster recovery plan
To ensure your entire team follows the preventative measures that help your business mitigate the risk and impact of data loss from natural disaster, your technologies, recovery objectives and protocols need to be documented in a strategic plan for your entire organization to access in the event of a worst case scenario. Without a clear strategy, data that could be recovered will likely be lost.
Did you know that data discovery is one of the first steps in ensuring you know exactly where your data resides, so you can better protect it from data loss?
Check out a demo of the Cavelo data discovery platform today, and learn how our technology helps your business gain complete visibility into where sensitive data lives.
