Top Risks for Data Loss

While you can save your important business data with one click, it can be lost just as easily. Your data is threatened by natural disasters, human error, cyber-attacks, and hardware failure, all of which can result in catastrophic data loss. Loss of data can cause a security breach and result in an expensive interruption to your business operations. If you are a regulated business, it can even lead to expensive fines and penalties.

To help protect your data, it is crucial to understand the most common threats and how to avoid them. The top three most common risks for data loss include:

Human Error

There are various ways that human error can result in data loss. Physical hardware can be damaged by accident by an employee. As an example, a laptop could be dropped or spilling a drink on the keyboard that results in physical damage and technical failure. Unsecured USB sticks or SD cards can be lost easily by employees. Laptops, tablets, and mobile phones are also at risk of being lost.

Other human errors can also occur, such as accidental deletion of data or an error during the formatting of the hard drive. Errors like this typically occur when employees lack proper training, which can lead to catastrophic damage.

Employees can also threaten your data by unknowingly downloading malware, like viruses or ransomware. This is where proper training is crucial to avoid accidental downloads of malware. We recommend that businesses regularly conduct complete audits of user activity and restrict employees from performing software installations.

Cyber Attack

When data is not properly secured, it is left vulnerable to hackers and cybercriminals. As mentioned above, malware can result in data loss. Malware is a term that encompasses all forms of malicious threats to your data from viruses, ransomware, and hackers. Hackers use this code to access your networks, steal your data, or destroy your data. Malware can come from anywhere utilizing unprotected access paths to devices that you use to conduct business that will disrupt your business operations.

Phishing attacks are a common way that malware gets injected into business operations. These pose a major threat to your business and account for 90% of the breaches faced by businesses. With a phishing attack, the hacker poses as a business contact, convincing the user to click on a malicious link. Once the user clicks on the link they give hackers access to private or sensitive information such as banking information, account logins, etc., or the link downloads a malicious file without the user’s knowledge. This is an attack that employees should be educated on as it relies on human error to be successful.

Ransomware is another common attack that affects thousands of businesses every year. With ransomware, the cybercriminal encrypts a company’s data to prevent them from accessing it, and then they force the company to pay a ransom to regain access. This type of attack relies on the business owner to pay the ransom with no guarantee that they will regain access to their data. It is certain that without the proper protections and remedies that the organization will lose large sums of money, impact their business operations, suffer from the loss of data, and perhaps even lose their business altogether.

Hardware Failure

Data loss can also occur due to a hardware failure, especially if the hardware is older. Eventually, all hardware will fail. Even if the hardware was produced flawlessly, it will eventually deteriorate and lead to data loss. Hard drives have mechanical parts that can fail, resulting in loss of data. Items such as USBs and SSD Drives are only going to support a certain number of saved files, and once they reach that point, they are of no use to you.

Data loss can also occur due to demagnetization, power supply problems, or the end of the device’s lifespan. Other ways hardware can fail is due to physical damage caused by improper storage, utilization, and drops.

How Can You Prevent Data Loss?

At CMIT Solutions of Pittsburgh South, we provide professional data protection and backup services that keep your data safe and secure. We will start by learning more about your data protection needs and forming a plan for your business. We will then implement the most effective mixture of software and hardware to ensure that your data is backed up and protected. Once this is completed, we will continuously manage your data, backups and resolve any issues that arise.

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