Best Tips from Remote DBA Experts to Help Keep Your Business Data Safe

Featured article by Mike Chapple, Chief Information Officer of the Brand Institute

Keeping your business data safe is crucial to the success of your business. The last thing you want is for your competitors to gain insight into your product secrets or for sensitive client information to be leaked. Protecting your data is not only important to the success of your business but can also keep you from hefty fines and lawsuits. How can you keep your data safe? This post looks at a couple of things you need to use in order to keep your business data secure.

Understand your risks

The first step to safeguarding your data is to understand your risks. You have to go through your data and determine which is the most sensitive. This could be your financial records, supplier details or customer information. You need to know where this data is stored and make a list of the potential risks.

Focus should be on the most confidential data such as customer records and financial accounts. You need to start by protecting this data by law. You also need a comprehensive record of where all your data is located, how often it is usually accessed and who accesses it. This will help better identify the threats that may be in the form of leaks to hackers or damage by viruses or system failure.

Protect your networks

Your data has to be transmitted from where it is stored to where it is needed. This is done through a network. While on transit, the data can be compromised. This is more so when your network has malware. Start by applying a firewall and buy reliable security software to reinforce your firewalls. Your data is more vulnerable to hacking when being transmitted.

Remote DBA experts will help find the best security software for your network. Focus more on software that includes location awareness and one that can keep tabs on all the applications that access the data. You also need security software that is regularly updated to defend against the newest threats. Encrypting your data will further improve data security.

Control the use of data

The worst mistake you can make is that of not limiting who can access your business data. The best way to keep your data secure is to limit access to the data. Everyone should not be able to edit the data either. This will help reduce the risk of accidental deletion or data theft.

Train the staff

Your staffs need to learn how to use your business data. Start by making sure that everyone knows how to encrypt the data before transmission. You need to enable such protocols as IPSec and SSL. Considering about 80% of data loss results from human error, you need to focus more on training your staffs.

Keeping your data secure is not a one-time thing. Threats keep on changing. It is your duty to keep up with the trends, invest in modern technology and make sure you use all necessary methods to keep your data secure. It pays to have a data management team to help. Alternatively, you can outsource data management to third parties. You can learn more from the post on inc.com titled ‘5 data security hacks to protect your business’.

Mike Chapple is the Chief Information Officer of the Brand Institute, a marketing consultancy company in Miami. In addition to writing guides on database management, he advises companies to consider the help of remote DBA experts if they don’t have the manpower in-house.