Does Your Business Have a Data Recovery Plan?

Have you ever gotten a new smartphone and gone through all the setup steps only to discover that your entire contact list from your old phone wasn't backed up properly? If it was a business phone loaded with vendor and customer contacts, how big was that headache?

Of course smartphones aren't the only electronic systems you use to conduct your business. You have computers, tablets, copy machines and maybe even an electronic key control system. All of these things store important data, and suddenly losing that data can have serious consequences.

Data corruption, security breaches, power loss, backup power failure, user error and hardware or software failure are all major causes of data loss and can happen at any time, no matter what steps you take to protect yourself.

If you use an electronic key control system for securing and tracking keys at your business, what would happen if you suddenly didn't know where your keys were in the drawer, which keys were checked out and who had them last? Losing key control system data would create unnecessary work for your employees, who must now figure out what keys go where, creating liability and security risks in the process.

The best thing you can do is have a recovery plan to help you continue operation during a data loss event. Here are some steps you can take to help you mange your keys if your system fails.

Use Reporting Features

Knowing who has keys and when they took them is a smart security and liability-reducing practice. It's also likely a big reason why you chose to implement an electronic key control system at your business. However, the ability to track key activity would be severely hampered if your system failed and you didn't have a contingency plan in place to continue operations.

That's where having a recent key inventory report can help you know what keys go where and manage key activity during the downtime. While not as efficient or secure as a fully operation electronic key control system, the ability to log key access manually with a recent report can help you continue operating and make sure keys are where they are supposed to be when the system is brought back online.

Perform Routine Backups

Just as you should pull reports for your system on a regular basis, you should also routinely back up your entire system to an external media device, such as a USB memory drive. It's a backup best practice to back your data up to an external location rather than the system itself.

If your server is still operational after some sort of outage or data loss, a recent backup can help you quickly restore the latest backed-up data and allow you to resume operations with minimal long-term disruption.

Prepare for the Worst

Unfortunately, even best-laid plans can still be spoiled if human error leads to a backup not being performed as scheduled or if your external storage device becomes corrupted. That's why you should choose an electronic key control system provider that can offer you a cloud backup solution.

An automatic off-site backup to a secure cloud gives you an added layer of protection against serious downtime. If your server is completely debilitated by an unexpected incident, such as a coffee spill or a pipe burst in your office, your latest backup can be loaded to a replacement server and promptly shipped to help you get your system running as soon as possible.

How have you prepared your business to recover from a data loss scenario?