Data backup as elemental security

It was a very typical situation of “yesterday it worked!” In the morning, the accountant’s laptop would not turn on. More precisely, it did turn on but the operating system did not load despite his best efforts like multiple reboots, battery replacements and visiting the BIOS settings. He thought to utilize boot discs, but alas, they did not help. The system stated that the primary drive was “not formatted”. The problem was that the drive contained accounting records, which seemed to only be a single copy.

The necessity to back up important data is basic, however, this rule is rarely observed. According to a survey by Kaspersky Lab and B2B International conducted in 2011, the proper procedures for preserving key data were being applied by about 63% of companies. At the same time, according to the study Kaspersky Lab and B2B International produced this year, 91% of the surveyed companies had experienced security incidents. Financial losses from a serious incident (like the loss of any data that cannot be restored) cost about $649,000 to commercial companies on average. In the case of small and medium businesses the cost amounts to $50,000.

Data may be considered completely secure only when there is another copy reserved to quickly restore it in the case of an emergency, and we’re not solely referring to robbery here. Computers tend to break and hard drives can fail without warning. But you can insure yourself against problems without requiring superhuman efforts or great expenses on your part.

Of course, large companies find it easier to raise funds for purchasing enterprise level data backup systems so that everything depends on management decisions only. Small businesses often cannot afford that; they also do not need large-scale solutions. Backup tools, like many other things without which data protection would be meaningless, are included in our Kaspersky Small Office Security.

The corresponding functions have a very simple interface. The user is invited to select the type of data that should be regularly backed up. Kaspersky Small Security Office automatically scans all files of this type on your computer regardless of their location.

Naturally, you can set Windows Desktop and My Documents folders for backup as well as any arbitrary folder on your computer.

The user is then prompted to create a repository, or rather to determine its location. This can be a folder on your local hard drive, a folder on an external drive (a flash drive, for example), an FTP-server or popular cloud service like Dropbox. Naturally, its use will require registration on the service (if you have not yet created an account on Dropbox).

Having an online storage center is useful anyway: it grants access to needed data from other devices anywhere. This variant is especially important for companies that have both a main office as well as remote workers.

Ultimately, the more backups that are created, the less likely they are to vanish without trace.

Backups can be done manually, but having automatic backups on a regular schedule are more important, with intervals from every five minutes to every month at a specified date and time.

The backup data is stored in the Backup container on the selected drive and it can be accessed only via Kaspersky Restore Utility, which is included in Kaspersky Lab’s packages (Kaspersky Small Office Security, etc.). This in itself provides an additional degree of security.

This data is best encrypted as an additional precaution. We will talk about it further in the next post dedicated to Kaspersky Small Office Security.