The end of the financial year (EOFY) is often seen as a busy time for small business owners as they prepare tax returns, group certificates and finalise sales to ensure that their financial record keeping is in order by June 30th.
It’s also a good time to take stock of your data management to ensure you are getting the most from your data and are protecting it in the right way, and a great time to take advantage of tax deductions on any technology you may need to keep everything safe.
Here are 5 data management best practice tips from Seagate:
Back up your data
Take some time to consider what data you need to back up and then what device will support your business needs. Should it be a portable or desktop drive, or do you need a NAS unit? What about using cloud storage?
Pick a back-up solution that will provide you with the capacity for your growing business and keep in mind that the rule of data storage is that you should always have two copies – each safely and separately stored.
Perhaps you could go for one local copy on a drive and one in the cloud.
Back up schedule
When was the last time you backed up your data? Last night? Last month? Hopefully not that long ago. To ensure your valuable data is safe and your business interest protected you should be backing up at least weekly but preferably every night.
Put a backup schedule in place and set it to automatically back up at regular times, or set reminders for yourself – whatever will work for you.
Prioritise data security
Do you have a data security policy for your small business?
Company data needs to be protected from increased security risks such as malware, phishing and identity theft which means you should store your data securely both in a virtual sense (on a robust drive) and physically (keep the back up somewhere safe).
You may also want to consider encrypting your data as an extra level of protection. Look for encryption features like those found on Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch.
Make data accessible
Is your data accessible once it’s saved? Data is useless if it is not used and understood, so make sure the right people in your team have access to the data that is important to their role.
Data recovery plan
If disaster strikes do you have a data recovery plan in place? Make sure you work out who will be responsible for recovering the data should an unexpected event occur or simply choose a storage solution that comes with the plan.
Having a plan in place will make things much less stressful in the hopefully unlikely event that something goes wrong with your computer and your data is lost.
Data recovery plans don’t need to be complicated; they just need to be clear about who is responsible and what steps they’ll take to recover the data.
Jeff Park is Country Manager for Australia and New Zealand for Seagate Technology.
