Four Ways To Prevent Data Loss

Picture this: you’ve just finished a long and important report for work, but your laptop crashes just before you can press save. Try as you might, you cannot recover the document, and all that hard work is gone, lost forever, and you have to start over, right at the very beginning. 

It’s a scenario that is everyone’s worst computing nightmares and one that you might even have been unlucky enough to experience firsthand. However, with a bit of planning and preparation, there are ways that you can protect your precious data, whether from a careless mistake or a security breach. Here are four ways to prevent data loss. 

1. Use automated code security

When it comes to building and shipping software, there’s always the worry that there will be a security breach that infiltrates your code and steals your precious data. However, automated code security software can help immensely with data loss prevention. This is because they harness the power of detectors to discover and classify your data silos and uncover data breaches before they happen. You will then be notified of any potential data breaches in real-time so that your team is empowered to take immediate action before they become a problem. 

2. Back up your data

The golden rule of data protection is: always back up your data. Prevention is key for stopping data loss, and even if your data is stolen or accidentally deleted from one source, you will still have a copy saved elsewhere. You should have at least three backups of anything that is important: on your desktop, a USB stick, and on a cloud storage service like Dropbox. Regularly save your data on each of your different formats, and periodically test your backups to ensure that it is being saved properly. 

3. Use email security

Hackers use many ploys to access your sensitive data, one of which being the classic scam email. These include emails purporting to be from a shipping service notifying you of a missed delivery, and fraudulent requests for bill repayments. Over recent months, perhaps due to the increased amount of time people spend at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, cybercriminals have honed their scam emails to the point where you may struggle to differentiate between a genuine email and one that has been sent with nefarious intent. Email security software will identify and filter out fraudulent junk emails so that you don’t have to rely on your own judgment. 

4. Educate your staff

Preventing data loss is not only about using security software and backing up data. Your staff should follow data security procedures to prevent security breaches and mistakes, and you should implement data security processes to follow. For instance, locking computer screens if you are away from the desk, not leaving confidential documents on the printer, and locking certain confidential documents so that only authorized users can gain access to them and edit them. Educating your staff on these essential habits should make it harder for data to be lost or stolen.