With the constant fall of prices of external hard drives, more and more companies are using these inexpensive units as their preferred method of backing up their business data.  To go with these units you will need some form of backup software, and if you wish to backup multiple computers, either several licences, or software that can backup your PC’s over your network.

Good business disaster planning should include the eventuality of not being able to gain access to your business, and this is an issue for this method of backup.  Also should the hard drive fail, you have lost all of your backups, and all hard drives fail, mobile units often sooner because they are treated with less respect.

Another major problem with this method of backup is that rarely is the data encrypted or access protected, like it would be when stored on the native PC, with even basic user verification/password.  This breaks the rules of the data protection act, and recently the authority’s have been coming down much harder on businesses that are breaking the rules.

However, are you happy to trust all of your business data to a unit costing say £60?  What would be the cost of replacing the data?

GBData online backup or Remote Backup software will take al of these issues away.  By installing the software on all of the PC’s requiring backup, or simply installing it on one PC and mapping the other computers through the network, all of your cmputers will be protected.

Our famous five minute install will leave you covered, and our 80G/30 day trial lets your try the service free from worries or commitments.

When laptops were first available, they were treated with great care and attention. To be given a laptop by your company marked you out as someone special.

Today, the laptop is commonplace. They are no longer the possession of high powered business executives or IT developers. Everyone from geeks to the occasional home user is moving away from desktop computers to the laptop.

There are many reasons for this. Price, processor power, increased battery life, footprint on the desk and the move to an increasingly mobile lifestyle, are just some of them. The laptop has now become so common that it’s “just another device” to many people. As a result, people have become careless. This is evidenced in the fact that almost every week there is another story of a lost or stolen laptop making the headlines. Often these stories only appear because the person or their job is considered “high profile”. Military chiefs, intelligence officers and even developers with personal credit card information have all been “named and shamed” yet the procession of losses goes on.

Some of the cases are down to acts of simple theft. Putting a bag containing a laptop on the ground while buying a railway ticket or leaving the laptop in the boot of a car is two of the common excuses. Having it stolen while in a pub or restaurant, leaving it on a train, plane, in a taxi are also very high up there on the agenda. It seems that the laptop has succeeded the umbrella in terms of the object of property people misplace the most.

So how bad is it? Recent figures from UK police forces show that over 34,000 laptops are reported stolen each year. This is almost 100 per day and only deals with those that are actually reported to the police.

What does it cost? That’s a question with no definitive answer. You can insure a laptop for around 7.5% of its value so a £1000 laptop would cost you just £75. Most insurers will look at the model and need a copy of any invoice. If you later add software to the laptop you will need to provide additional information to your insurer and, depending on the cost of the software pay an additional premium.

What about my data? Good question. What’s your data worth to you? When did you last back it up? Basic insurance policies as described above WILL NOT include restitution of data. These are generally part of a separate insurance policy for your business. A quick call to your insurance broker will establish what these premiums are but generally expect to pay around £100 for data restitution costs of up to £5000. This is only for restoring your data eg the cost of re-keying data or recovering a corrupted hard disk. It does not compensate you for unique data that you might have lost such as software under development or notes about customers. Many insurance companies will simply point out that you should have backed that data up.

A recurring theme in the recent stories, such as the US-based MCI employee whose laptop contained the personal details of 16,500 employees, is that identity theft is the key goal of laptop thieves. This is more likely to be a secondary gain to the thief rather than a major target and no police force or insurance agent would offer any figures to cover professional targeting of laptops for this purpose.

The same can be said of the number of senior executives whose laptops get stolen. Generally, they are seen as highly attractive items as they are top of the range technology. While there is an increasing market in Intellectual Property, there are no statistics kept as to whether such information is actually traded and for what sort of money. It is more likely that such information will be stolen by hackers.

Protecting against laptop and data theft would appear to be relatively easy but, in a business sense, is rarely so. Some basic steps for employees to follow in order to protect laptops include:

1. Leave the laptop unattended in a public place.
2. Leave a laptop on a desktop at lunch, while in a meeting or overnight.
3. put a laptop in hold baggage.
4. In a restaurant or bar, always ensure that the bag containing the laptop cannot be snatched. Put the shoulder strap under your chair leg.
5. You need to visit the bathroom, take your bag with you unless you are with a trusted colleague who you have asked to “mind” your laptop.
6. Bags might look like the ideal place to keep you laptop but they stand out a mile. Try and keep the laptop in a less obvious bag such as a briefcase.
7. In a hotel, store the laptop in the room safe, even when just going for breakfast, dinner or to use the gym. If the room doesn’t have a safe, take it to the front desk and have the hotel store it for you.
8. Leave the laptop or the bag containing the laptop on show in the car, even if you are in the car with it. Many a bag has been snatched through a car window while stopped in traffic.
9. You need to leave the laptop in the car, conceal it in the boot.
10. Leave it in the boot for long periods and never leave it overnight.

These might all seem like commonsense items but for every single entry in this list you will find people who have lost their computers by not taking precautions.

What about data? Protection of corporate data is critical today. You could argue that employees should not have sensitive information on their laptop when out of the office. While this would be nice, the reality is that the laptop is a working environment. This means that the person carrying the laptop needs that data in order to do some form of work.

So what can you do?

1. Strong but memorable passwords. – Too many people write down passwords because the password policy is unworkable. You could dispense with conventional passwords and use Pointsec PicturePIN which consists of a series of pictures so that the user simply points out the pictures corresponding to “his” story. Not only is this system just as secure as traditional passwords, but it’s easier to remember with no chance that you’ll be tempted to write your “password” down.
2. The data on the disk. – This will ensure that even if the disk can be accessed, the data is secure. Make sure the encryption is seamless and quick, and managed centrally, so that the user cannot circumvent it.
3. Users about the risks of carrying too much data and do regular audits to ensure that non essential data is deleted. – It’s too easy to just “leave” data on the computer after it is no longer needed. An audit policy design as part of a risk assessment process will reduce the impact of data loss and ensure you know exactly “what” has been lost.
4. A backup mechanism that makes it easy for users to take copies of data daily while traveling. – GBData online backup software can be installed, and runs automatically, all that is needed is an internet connection, common place nowadays.
5. A Laptop Protection Policy. – This is a document that outlines the responsibility of the user and how they should treat their laptop and data. It is no less important than any other corporate email or data policy and, as such, should be part of the employees contract of employment.

What you can do, however, is make it harder for thieves to get hold of devices through the simple security steps outlined above. By encrypting data and good use of passwords, you can also ensure that the only value to the thief is from the sale of the laptop and not your data.

The ultimate protection is the installation of GBData backup software, so that should the worst happen, you can be confident htat all your data is safe.

According to a recent Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC)-sponsored survey, SMB customers are “getting more serious about their information protection” and therefore, channel partners need to be ready for the “huge opportunities” that will present themselves in this space, said one Symantec executive.

Monica Girolami, a senior product marketing manager at Symantec, said one of the key findings from the 2010 Information Protection Survey was that “SMBs are really getting serious now about their information protection. This is exciting for us because this shows that the awareness that we’ve in addition to other vendors and partners, have been trying to drive, is finally starting to pay off. But we still have a ways to go.”

When asked to rank their top five business risks, survey participants rated data loss and cyber-attacks as their top one and two respective risks, followed by traditional criminal activity, natural disasters and terrorism.

In addition, Girolami said survey respondents noted that their top IT improvement areas were solutions involving backup and recovery, disaster recovery and security. Likely due in large part to the consumerization of IT and more workers now bringing their own devices into the workplace, security and policies around them are becoming more important, Girolami said.

“People are sharing information more freely now, whether that’s through things like laptops or PDAs,” Girolami explained. “It becomes more of a question of ‘Where does the critical information reside and what can be done to protect it?’ While all organizations face these same types of challenges, SMBs don’t have the dollars to put towards these (efforts), or the necessary education in the areas they’re challenged in.”

While 31 per cent of survey participants said they back up their data on a daily basis, 47 per cent said they don’t. When asked why they don’t back up their data, 39 per cent of businesses said it “never occurred to (them) to do so.”

For the channel, this becomes an opportunity to get out and talk to both new and existing customers, Girolami said. Partners should help their customers better understand the importance of having Internet security guidelines and policies and make sure that customers are aware of the latest security risks and threats. Partners can also help customers with disaster recovery plans and testing them to make sure everything’s in working order.

“Partners should ask their customers questions like, ‘What are you doing today to ensure you can recover your systems in the event of a disaster?’” Girolami advises. “Partners can then start looking at disaster recovery plans with their customers to provide them with more of a value-add.”

On the technology side, customers should implement a data loss prevention (DLP) solution, in addition to having backup and recovery protection to better secure critical business information from cyber-attack, human error or natural disasters, she added.

Channel partners can offer their customers Symantec’s Protection Suite Advanced Business Edition, which Girolami said is an all-in-one, comprehensive security solution suite which includes capabilities such as endpoint security, messaging security and backup and recovery protection.

“Partners can now have an overall discussion around information protection and bring a comprehensive solution to the table instead of just talking about point products,” Girolami said.

You can read the full article here:

Online data backup services have been described as an ideal solution for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

In an article in Processor, George Crump looks at the various advantages of cloud storage and how it could help SMEs.

He reminds readers that one of the attractive aspects of the technology is that, as well as being provided on a pay-as-you-go basis, it is also scalable so that the capacity grows as the business needs more online data backup services.

Mr Crump adds: “SME’s consider cloud storage as an area to store backups for disaster recovery.

“An internal backup infrastructure is needed, but for those SMEs that don’t have an ideal disaster recovery target, a cloud option could be ideal.”

FOUR German volunteers are counting the cost after laptop computers containing thousands of personal photos were stolen from their Bayswater home.

The full story can be read here:

It is an awful loss that these guys have had, however as a lesson, it shows that laptops are just as susceptable to dataloss, however it is caused.

At GBData we often hear of laptops being stolen, especially so while using the London underground.

To help mitigate the loss our advice is to install our backup software, which might not even cost you anymore, as you can install it on as many PC’s as you like, wether they be servers, desktops or laptops.

Carl.

In the modern business world, information is king, providing the means to undertake the business. So the question begs; why are some companies fundamentally lax with their information?

The full story can be read here:

Using GBData remote backup, you can rest assured that your data is not only protected, but also encrypted to 256Bit, which is a level higher than banks use.

This encryption also extends to the local copy that our software can also create.

There is no use in having high levels of access protection on your PC, only for all of this protection to be removed as soon as you create a local copy of your data to a removable hard drive for instance.

GBData software encrypts all of its data, so that its local copies are just as unreadable to unauthorised eyes, as the data transmitted to our servers.

Carl.

From 6 April 2010, businesses can face fines of up to £500,000* if they breach data protection laws.

There are no new rules laid down by this regulation, but penalties will be stiffened for contravention of existing rules,

so now is the time to review your company practices in relation to personal data protection legislation.

Further information can be found here:

GBData online backup software encrypts all data before it leaves your PC, so ensuring that you always conform to the data

protection act.  This also includes if you run a local copy backup using our software.

On a recent Gadget Show shown on Channel 5, Jon promoted backing up of your computer.

He showed various different online backup services, “competitors” of GBData if you will, and complained that even they lose data (see here for more information on the famous Carbonite data loss), which he showed.  Why am I therefore bringing this to your attention you may ask?

Well he finished by saying that IT specialists say that computer data needs to be held in 3 different places, else it is not held at all.  Well this is not news to GBData.  Our service offers the option of also backing up your data to an inexpensive external hard drive, as well as transfering your encrypted files safely offsite to the GBData servers.  This therefore allows your data to be in 3 places at once; where it was originally stored, on a local external hard drive; encrypted of course, and off site on our servers.

When evaluating backup methods keep this in mind, because few others offer this as an option.

There is an interesting article today, that discusses the cost of backing up your data.

The article can be found here:

It discusses the time when you have to perform a restore of your data, your heart is in your mouth, and suddenly the cost of backing up springs to mind; have you been a cheapskate, or does this premium service really work?

Backing up your data is the same as taking out insurance, no one wants to spend any money on it, until the times when you really need it, then you are really glad you spent that money.

Of course everything has a value, and you would not pay any price for a backup service, because ultimately your data has a value too, it is up to you to put a real value on the loss of that data, before deciding on how much you would be happy to pay for a backup service.

Carl.

The importance of an online data storage backup solution has been emphasised by a significant loss of information in the US.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a computer glitch in Santa Clara County resulted in the loss of backup copies of information.

It has been estimated that the cost of replacing this information will be around $600,000, to get the information needed about tenant and rental units for the Housing Authority in the area.

The news provider reports that “computer hardware and software failures” led to 1.6 million images being wiped out, meaning officials will have to go over the original documents again to reload the data.

Of course, with an online data storage backup solution, there would have been no risk of accidentally wiping out data as it would be kept secure with a hosting company.

Online data backup services were recently recommended to small and medium-sized businesses looking for disaster recovery abilities without having to invest in hardware.