Three of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money, Business/Entrepreneurship and Technology. A major part of running your business in the modern age is managing its data. The inability to properly manage your company’s data will cost you both time and money. The following contributed post is entitled, Taking Responsibility For Your Company Data.
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Image Credit Pixabat CC0
Whatever your line of business, when you put the time and effort in, it becomes of value to you. It is an investment into your companies goals and as such, should be treated with the same level of care that you would treat any other investment.
This is very true of your companies digital history. Everything that you make, every document or spreadsheet is there for a purpose. It was created in an attempt to drive your business forward and as such it holds an intrinsic value.
But, data is so transitory. You can send it, move it, delete it. You could find that accidentally end up overwriting important files quite easily. Your important customer data could get corrupted by a virus, and be unopenable. Your information may get stolen, or your hard drive could completely die and you will be left with nothing.
In this day and age, losing data is like losing all of your money. If you are holding onto customer information that could put them at risk, you may be liable and end up paying some hefty fines for not properly managing your data protection. If the information is completely gone, you may not have a customer database to work from or projects that have taken many hours of work could be lost.
Retrieving Lost Data
There are a number of ways forward when you hit this situation. The first thing to consider doing is to bring in a specialist who can deal with backup & disaster recovery. There are occasions where information can be restored. It may be helpful to utilize the services of a managed IT service provider to look after your data needs. That way, when the worst happens, you will always have their support on hand.
Implementing Better Systems
One of the best ways is to avoid this kind of situation altogether. By utilizing a system where your data cannot even be lost completely, you will be protecting your business from catastrophe. Cloud-based systems offer this exact thing. Your data is saved in realtime as you create it. It is not stored physically on any of your devices and can be accessed anywhere as long as you can log in. You can choose to share your documents with others, and you won’t need to email them copies. Any changes that you ever make will be visible at their end.
Using systems such as these not only protect your data, they make the handling and management of it far easier. You will have a much more streamlined and efficient office when it comes to using cloud-based systems.
Manage Your Permissions
Be sure and devote some time to getting your permissions and access levels set up correctly on all of your important files and folders. While you can share editing functions across an entire team, you may not want some of your staff to be able to do this. Having the correct settings in place will also protect your data from those within your organization.
