What’s the best way to protect your data from natural disasters such as flooding?

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

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. 

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. 

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 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.

When you consider potential threats to your business, emergencies like hacking, theft, and fire come to mind. However, how often do you consider the damage that a hurricane or flood might cause to your business and data? 

If you live in an area with a high-risk for flooding, it’s important to begin planning for the worst case scenario. Even if you have insurance on your building or property, what about your business data? 

Flooding can cause extreme damage to the physical storage devices that contain the data that your team needs to work, as well as to the equipment that they use to do that work. Here, we’re going to look at three ways you can prevent the loss of sensitive data during a natural disaster event such as flooding. 

Backup Data to the Cloud

The cloud refers to a type of computing that has become hugely popular for a wide variety of reasons. Cloud computing and cloud software are essential for businesses that rely on remote teams and are a good backup for teams who are forced to work from home due to extensive flood and hurricane damage to an office space.

However, when it comes to backing up data, it’s cloud storage that is going to be the primary security for your data. By switching to the cloud, you store your vital data on a remote server that is accessed online, so it stays safe from physical threats such as flooding.  

Even if a hurricane directly hits the storage devices in your office, you have a backups that you can access, download, and start working with immediately. Switching to the cloud can prevent data loss and secure your data. 

Many MSPs offer cloud solutions specially customized to their customer’s needs, too, so you don’t need to worry about paying more for options that you don’t use.

Keep Physical Sensitive Data in Secure Places

If you have any sensitive data that you cannot upload to the cloud or you’d rather store physically, then you need to treat it like it’s the most vulnerable and valuable thing in your business. 

Following a major data loss, most businesses do not survive for more than a year. To make sure that this doesn’t happen to your business, you should consider putting your physical storage in places that are protected against the elements.

For a lot of businesses, the only data that you cannot back up digitally are those that are stored on paper. Your papers and folders should, for that reason, be kept in a water-tight safe or, at the very least, above a waterline to prevent damage from a flood. 

Of course, some business owners are not aware they are in a flood or hurricane-prone area, which can mean they don’t think too much about protecting their work assets from such disasters. However, that only makes it more essential to invest in the waterproof protection that your physical data and devices need.

Ensure Remote Working Cybersecurity

If your business experiences a major flood or hurricane, then there is a good chance that teams may work remotely for the foreseeable future. If that’s the case, then you need to prepare for the added risk of employing remote workers.

Remote workers rarely secure their connection to the cloud or other shared spaces that contain sensitive data, making them a prime target for hackers. They can inadvertently open up a weak point in an IT scope that was previously believed to be secure. 

Thankfully, there are a variety of tools, softwares, applications, and other measures that will prevent a data breach. Aside from cloud solutions, which tend to be very secure, MSPs can also recommend a virtual private network (VPN). 

VPNs effectively scramble the data that is being sent to and from anyone who accesses your Cloud servers. This way, even if someone were to intercept that data, it would be so scrambled that it would be incredibly unlikely they could ever figure out exactly what it means. 

Of course, it’s recommended you do what you can to ensure your team takes advantage of protective measures such as professional quality firewalls and anti-malware software.

Are You Protecting Your Business from Disaster?

The three solutions above might not protect your data from every eventuality. However, they can ensure that it is kept as safe as possible during major floods and hurricanes, which are only increasing in severity and frequency. 

For that reason, it’s important to take the threat of floods seriously and protect your valuable business data from damage and loss. 

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