Data Loss Through Theft

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Theft is another cause of data loss. Theft manifests itself either via a “data spill” in which data isn’t lost but instead made available to third-parties for whom the data wasn’t intended or in outright destruction. For the purposes of this blog, we’re going to limit our discussion to outright destruction of data.

 

The destruction of data is rarely performed by a relatively disinterested “hacker”; instead, it is most often performed by a disgruntled employee or ex-employee. It is incredibly difficult to prevent; although precautions should be and most often are taken particularly around the involuntary termination of employees.

 

Taking Another Path

 

The first step to avoid malicious destruction is to create policies which make your primary data more difficult to destroy. These include strict policies and procedures associated with not only involuntary but voluntary termination as well and on taking steps to secure your environment from external access.

 

From the perspective of data protection, theft is largely indistinguishable from human error in terms of the tools and techniques that must be used to protect your data – the only difference between the two is motive and motive isn’t really a factor in terms of this type of logical failure. Automation and retention again are the most important strategies for ensuring that you can survive this type of threat.

 

For more information on protecting your business from theft of data, contact NPV.com.

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Disregarding Software Corruption Leads you to Lose Data

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Shortcut to Losing Your Data

Software corruption is the third leading cause of data loss. Anyone who has lived through a BSoD (Blue Screen of Death) in Windows understands the concept. Of course, software corruption is caused not only by software defects but through the chaining of errors in systems as well. It’s important to ignore software corruption in order to increase your odds of losing your data.

Taking Another Path

Software corruption, like human error, is another type of logical (as opposed to physical, or hardware) failure. The primary differentiation with respect to data loss is that software corruption can occur and remain undetected for days, weeks, months, or years. Thus automation for strict adherence to policy and retention are incredibly important techniques for protecting your data against software corruption.

If you are experiencing software corruption, contact NPV.com.

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Follow Policy to Avoid Data Loss

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Human Error is a Shortcut to Losing Your Data

Human error is the second leading cause of data loss. Human error ranges from accidental deletion of files and records to ignoring policies regarding data to rebooting systems without proper shutdown procedures. Blind belief and trust in your fellow coworkers to not only follow policy but to not make any mistakes at all are fundamental to using this shortcut to its fullest potential in losing your data.

Avoid Losing Data Through Human Error

There are two fundamental reasons for human error: ignorance and arrogance. Attempting to change human nature is the height of arrogance. People have a tendency to be incredibly poor at following policy. Thus specifying that all “important” data will be stored only on centralized corporate servers and storage tends to fail as soon as a C-level executive loses the data on their notebook. But even when people try their best to follow policy, accidents such as file and record deletion will occur. The best defenses against human error are automation and retention. Automation allows policies and procedures to be created and automatically executed. Retention allows recovery of data even when the data loss isn’t noticed for some period of time.

Retention is one of the fundamental differentiations between backup and simple high availability (which is typically achieved with some type of replication) – high availability handles hardware failure well but does a poor job of handling logical failures such as those caused by human error – because logical failure is simply replicated in highly available systems. Of course, protecting against hardware failure using high availability and against all types of failure using backup is a common technique for protecting data and systems.

Previously, we described why D2D is such an important component of protecting your system. When we discuss any type of logical failure, including human error, another important concept is to protect your data using a superset of D2D which is called D2D2x (Disk-to-Disk-to-Any.) D2D2x simply means that you have longer-term strategies for backups to either on-premise rotational archiving media (disk or tape – although tape has the risks we’ve discussed previously) or to a private or public cloud.

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Have you Ever Wanted to Send Large Files by Email ?

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Google announced recently that it will be integrating Google Drive into Gmail, a move that will make it possible to send files up to a massive 10GB in size over your email.

 

A new button in the Gmail compose window will give users the ability to attach a file from their Google Drive account instead of attaching the file itself to the message body.

 

Once attached, Gmail will ensure that your recipient has permission to view the file in your Drive account otherwise, the system will prompt you to grant that permission –- and then sends the message.

 

The feature works not only for files you attach to the message, but also for links to items stored in Google Drive you might paste into a message.

 

Since you’re essentially sharing a link to the file in the cloud rather than the file itself, you can continue to update it, with those updates showing up for your recipient as well. You can collaborate on the shared document with the recipient directly in Google Drive, keeping a single copy rather than passing drafts back and forth, further filling your mailbox.

 

Microsoft currently offers a similar feature via Outlook and SkyDrive as well.

 

Each Google Drive user is granted 5GB of free storage from Google. In order to store and send files larger than 5GB users will be required to purchase additional Google Drive storage space to accommodate those files. Currently you can purchase 25GB of additional Google Drive storage for $2.49 per month, or 100GB for $4.99 per month.