Work from Home? Here's how to protect your data.

Author: Swapna Naraharisetty, 2BrightSparks Pte. Ltd.

When employees work remotely, they will usually use laptops or mobile devices to access, update or change business-critical data. However, many companies do not implement a backup system on mobile devices, meaning that remote employees often have problems syncing data automatically to their organization file servers from their laptops. As a result, the data stored on the file servers may not be up-to-date and may cause further disruption to business activities.

Therefore, a proper backup and recovery plan is required to ensure the business continuity for enterprises, small and medium-sized companies when disaster occurs.

How to protect your data?

Every business should implement a reliable backup system to automatically backup data to their file servers. In addition, businesses should implement a secondary backup plan when disasters or major interruptions happen, and a significant portion of the employees are forced to work from home in response to current events.

What backup solutions are available when working remotely?

Being forced to work from home doesn't have to mean sacrificing the safety of your data. In fact there are several ways to migrate data from remote laptops and devices to the organization file servers.

Workers can back up their data to an external drive and then synchronize data from the external drive to the file servers. However, with this method the changed files will not be updated automatically to the file server. Also, the employee needs to physically carry the external drive to the data centre to migrate data, which is not recommended during any disaster.

An alternative solution is to use FTP servers to transfer data from remote laptop to the data centres but setting-up an FTP server is very complex process for non-technical users.

Therefore, a viable and convenient backup solution for remote employees is to use a fully automated cloud-based backup and recovery system. All your data on the remote laptops/devices will be migrated automatically to a cloud server like Amazon S3, Backblaze, Microsoft Azure or Google storage. And from the cloud server the data will be synced automatically to the organization data centres. This way the data will not be lost, and file servers will be updated automatically when a file is changed by a remote employee.

What other backup strategies you can use when working remotely?

We recommend implementing a 3-2-1 backup strategy in your business to keep three backup copies of your data on two different locations and one at an offsite location to recover from data loss.

In addition, you need to implement powerful security features to protect the data stored on laptops/PCs from ransomware attacks and prevent data loss.

You can also use a centralized backup monitoring system to continuously monitor, control and manage backups from a remote device and ensure the continuity of your business.

Conclusion

Every business should plan and implement an appropriate data backup and recovery plan to handle any disaster and/or unexpected situation. And for many businesses, working from home is a relatively easy series of obstacles to overcome.

- With SyncBackPro, you can easily implement automated cloud-based backup and recovery system in your business. SyncBackPro supports backup to/from Amazon S3™, Google Storage™, Microsoft Azure™, Backblaze™ B2, OVH™, Egnyte™ and many other cloud services. You can read our How to choose the right cloud storage service article for guidelines to choose the best cloud storage for your backup needs.

- Using SyncBackPro, you can also implement 3-2-1 backup strategy in your environment and mitigate the effects of disasters.

- SyncBackPro offers several effective solutions to safeguard your data from ransomware attacks, detect a ransomware infection on your host system and stop it infecting your backup storage. For additional details read our Ransomware Detection article.