Making sure data is secure
January 13, 2009
A friend of mine recently had a complete nightmare with lost information. The server that all the company information was stored on was stolen in a burglary and unfortunately the backup drive that was used to take backups of the data was still plugged into the server! All the company information was completely lost.
For my friend, who is a HR Officer, this meant that all staff information was gone; she had no idea of people’s holidays that they had taken, absence records, policy documents, staff correspondence, and the employee database had gone. It has taken a long time to try to re-create all the files that have been lost, and some information will never be replaced. Fortunately because a lot of HR paperwork needs to be signed, they had a lot of employees’ documents in hard copy in a filing cabinet, but the whole episode has been extremely difficult to deal with.
Data security is such an important matter for any business, and in HR the loss of information could have major repercussions, especially if the information lost could be needed for things like disciplinary and dismissal decisions. There is also the question of data protection and the fact that personal information is now somewhere outside the company.
Ensuring data is secure and regular backups are taken should be part of company policies and procedures, with responsibilities for day to day back ups for employees, and key requirements for server backups on job descriptions for relevant personnel, such as IT Managers.
Another option, rather than having in-house data backup systems, which is subject to human error, is to use online backup services from companies that manage your data security for you. These services can be described as disaster recovery (i.e. recovering all data after hardware is lost, e.g. in a fire or theft) or business continuity (which includes automatically saving changed documents as new versions so that you can keep a record of the progression/change history of a document).
These options are now being used by many companies that want to avoid the kind of problems that my friend experienced through a human mistake, which can happen to anyone, as we know from the countless episodes of lost Government data that happened last year.
Things to consider:Backup solutions.
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