The more times that the world spins around, the amount of data generated just grows exponentially. If you are generating data, it needs to be stored somewhere and probably backed up. One overlooked aspect of data is that it is valuable, really valuable…no matter if it’s your family photos or your work documents. You can put a price on some of your data, but some of it is invaluable. Do you use data encryption?
Because of this value, your data needs to be protected, whether it’s in the cloud or on your hard drive. That is where data encryption comes in — encryption is a process that encodes your data so that only you or other authorized users and get to your data. This helps protect you from identity theft, hackers, viruses, etc. Since there are many, many ways to store data, here are some ideas on how to protect it, depending on your solution.
Data in the Cloud
If you store your data in the cloud on google drive, dropbox, Copy, Salesforce.com, or some industry-specific SaaS (software as a service) solution, one way to protect your data is passwords, like we talked about in this blog (link to it). One solution that we talked about in there is Lastpass (https://lastpass.com/) that uses the leading encryption technology to access your data on all of your devices with one password. LastPass uses the latest encryption and key derivation technology to guard your passwords. If your company is deeper into the cloud, there are several other types of encryption technology that can possibly work with your technology.
There are several data backup solutions that offer strong protection. There’s Carbonite, Barracuda, Amazon, etc., that offer services. Each of these have a certain level of protection built into them, as well as what rights they have to your files. These change constantly, from data plans to hardware, terms and conditions, and other factors, so make sure you do your homework before signing up for a service.
Going Old School
The “old school” way of storing and backing up your data is on your hard drive, thumbdrive, or external hard drive. There are ways to protect your data on this hardware. Both Apple (FileVault) and Windows (BitLocker) has a tools to encrypt folders and drives as needed, or there are other software solutions that can help you protect your data like TrueCrypt or DiskCryptor.
There are many ways you can protect and encrypt your valuable data. The most important thing you can do is to research before you pick your solution… taking into account what your goals are and how you will use whatever solution that you choose.
So, how will you protect your data?