Many businesses are now relying on online backup providers to keep data secure in data centers. The goal of an off-site storage is to protect your business from any threat, including earthquakes, power outages, and hackers. Although these events may not occur, there is one harsh reality that every online backup provider deals with–hardware component failure. It’s also a fact that data loss happens in your own offices, (spilled drinks, accidental file deletions, lost or stolen disks, as well as hard drive crashes), as a daily occurrence.
If you don’t have a consistent strategy for backing up your company’s computers and servers, you are opening the door to liabilities and losses in revenue and reputation. While traditional backup solutions can be expensive and take weeks to set up, a reliable offsite backup solution can be set up in a fraction of the time, with no setup fees, or hardware purchases. Backup solutions are easily managed, and are scalable to your needs, often paying only for the number of licenses you need and the backup space your business requires.
Online backup providers offer secure solutions that enable businesses to continuously backup, restore, access, and share information online from any location. You can manage multi-user environments, schedule automatic backups, and monitor your backups from a single web-based admin console. Now you can stop wasting time and money with hardware, stacks of CD’s, and traditional tape backup systems and free up your in-house IT resources for more productive use in your more vital revenue generating activities.
Seeing as it’s time for spring cleaning, and with Earth Day right around the corner, many businesses are scheduling an annual day of recycling old equipment and upgrading to newer models. We wanted to dive a little deeper into one area of tech recycling: copiers, or all-in-one printer/scanner/fax machines.
If you own or manage a mid- to large-sized business, you probably lease your copier rather than own it. About a year ago, CBS aired an expose of a security threat regarding these machines. The enterprise-sized models usually contain a hard drive, which stores all the data that passes through them. Shred paper documents all you want, if the information passed through the copier/scanner/fax machine, it’s stored in the hard drive.
The problem is when these machines are leased, businesses owners and managers don’t take measures to ensure that the hard drives are wiped or destroyed before the machines go back to the leasing company–who often resell them. If the hard drive remains in the copier, the next customer has access to all the sensitive information that was scanned, faxed, and copied while you leased the copier. Think of what passes through that machine: employee identification, such as passports and social security numbers, invoices, financial statements, credit card statements from T&E reports, and more.
PCMag’s Security Watch blog responded to the CBS report with the following advice:
“What if your printer does contain a hard drive–what should you do before selling or giving it away? When the hard drive is an optional component, you’ll generally find it easy to remove. Those with sufficient skills may be able to mount the drive in a PC and use secure file deletion software to wipe out any data beyond the possibility of recovery. Of course you could also just remove and destroy the hard drive before disposing of the printer.
“If the printer has a fully integrated hard drive that can’t be removed, and if the vendor doesn’t supply any sort of utility to wipe that drive, you’re pretty much out of luck. You can cross your fingers and hope the recipient doesn’t skim your data out of the printer. Or you can trash the hard drive even at the expense of turning the printer into e-waste.”
Whether your business leases or owns its copiers, make sure you have candid conversations with the supplier about the hard drive and your options for keeping or destroying the data that’s on them.
By Jill Duffy for PCMAG.com
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