Data protection involves the process of safeguarding crucial information from corruption, loss or compromise. With the increasing growth of data creation and storage, the importance of data protection also increases.  Have you ever faced a moment of panic where you thought to have lost important data? Whether it’s a report from work, personal images or a semester’s worth of homework, we all have data on our mobile device or hard drive that is too valuable to lose.  This is where data protection and backup come in. There’s even a World backup Day dedicated to the importance of protecting data.

Data are sensitive information that needs to be protected to maintain the privacy of oneself.  The information can be related to your partners or next kind, your current staff, clients, customers, and other public members. 

Source: Pexels

What exactly is data protection, and what is its importance?

Millions of employees have started working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic. Therefore, businesses need to adapt to ensure securing or protecting of data of employees from employees’ laptops at home to the central data center in the office. I will reveal everything about data protection, its key strategies and trends.

Information stored digitally must be properly protected. Both data protection and privacy are crucial both for individuals and businesses. The business will successfully thrive in the corporate arena with complete data protection from contact information to personal and financial details. It is now a legal necessity and a crucial aspect of protecting your business or yourself.

Crucial data like emails, phone numbers, health information, names bank details should be protected by the business. If someone has access to the details of your staff or customer, they can hack into their accounts and steal all their money. Needless to say, since we have already seen how third parties may use details like SSN or ID number for creating fake profiles and use it for fraud business.

VPN can be used to enhance data protection. They are great for the usage of personal and business. You can go through forums of data & statistics homework help where experts tend to discuss other ways how data can be protected.

Purpose of laws surrounding data protection

Most of the countries constitute laws in relation to data protection which all organisations are expected to follow.  Businesses may get negatively affected and may result in serious legal actions if the organisation does not abide by the regulations. Businesses, governments and organisations must adhere to these protection laws to keep all the sensitive information safe, lawful and accurate.Organisation or businesses need to have a clear privacy policy and data protection on how data shared with you will be used.

Here are the true purposes of data protection laws:

1. To limit data breaches affecting individuals

Most organisations do not have strong and comprehensive data protection controls. Due to this, data theft and hacking are quite high. However, it is quite easy with technology development to store and transmit data securely. With implementing up-to-date security controls, breaches that may impact data subjects can easily be avoided

• To avoid breaches that affect your business

It’s essential to safeguard the data of staff, customers and suppliers as failure to do this will damage a business to a large extend.  Organisations need to maintain strong security measures like Transport layer Security (TLS), robust firewalls and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for data protection.  While using VOPs, they need to make sure of using only a credible provider.  Implementing these measures will lower the cases of security incidents from data breaches and save businesses from losing money and time dealing with civil suits or fines.

• To maintain brand value

Businesses that go to their extent to protect or secure customers, employees, and shareholders can easily build emotional brand connections. This results in customer loyalty since people are assured that they will keep their data secured and safe from fraudsters. The business will be able to improve its brand value with effective data protection. It also shows that the company values customer’s safer.  Individuals who experience data breaches tend to lose trust in the organisation and start looking for an alternate business. Thus protecting people’s data is so crucial to improving and maintaining brand value and loyalty.

• To promote ethics

Companies that have not done yet must follow ethical practices to stand in the business for long. However, following such ethical policies only indicates that information will be responsibly handled and not used in activities that may cause harm.

What are the backup and its importance?

A backup is like having a second copy of your essential fileslike home videos, documents, family photos and emails. You store copy all of these important files to somewhere safe. You will be surprised to see how losing your file can be common among people.  Just a small failure or accident can destroy all of the important stuff that you care about.  There are two common ways to backup files: to an external drive or somewhere on the internet. You should treat backup as basic cyber hygiene. 

It is like an archive or a copy of important information stored on devices like phones, computers or tablets. Restoring original information to avoid any data loss is an essential step. There can be several forms of data losses like ransomware attacks, physical thefts, hard drive failures, or physical thefts. Thus, whenever you have a crushing feeling that your hard work is about to go in vain or your treasured memories will be gone, you will be assured that data backup has your back.

Yet, there are still 30% of people who have not backed up their devices. This may seem like a lot to you until you put yourself under the perspective of how data tends to get lost often:

Here are some highlights o some cases:

• 1 in every 10 computers gets affected by a virus every month. (World Backup Day)
• Every minute 113 phones get either stolen or lost (World Backup Day)
• More than 70 million phones get lost each year. (Kensington)
• Businesses were attacked with ransomware every 14 seconds in 2019. (cybercrime Magazine)
• In the US, laptops tend to get stolen every 53 seconds. (Kensington)

Treat data backup as the bedrock of your digital disaster recovery plan. When you backup your data, you are already one step ahead of any cyber threats you might face in the future, which may result in huge data loss.  Cyber threats are not always the reason for losing data. The reason you lose data can also be because your computer r your external hard drive has worn out.  Backing up your data will help you restore your data on a new device.

Here are the common types of data you must back up:

• Pictures
• Spreadsheets
• Music files
• Address books
• Videos
• Financial databases
• Documents
• Emails
• Excel sheets

SUMMING UP,

Don’t underestimate the value of data protection or having backup copies of highly important things to you.  Take time to organise them and keep them secured on your device. Data backups should not seem like a chore to you since we are evolving in a world with digital citizens. Data protection and data backup will provide peace of mind that shows you have done everything to secure and safeguard your important information.

AUTHOR BIO:

Henry Tesfaye works in an IT department in one of the most reputed IT industries in the UK. He is also associated with Allessaywriter.com, where he offers IT assignment help and statistic homework help solution to students.