Dear entrepreneurs,

You are amazingly creative and enterprising. You are the backbone of our economy. Most of you are owners of SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) whose contribution to employment creation, and country’s tax revenues is just immense. I am also one of you.

My 22 years of consulting and advisory to you, fantastic human beings, is a journey to look back and learn from. You always value technology. You proactively adopt technology in its latest form to run your business, to become competitive and to remain competitive.

This makes you not only an owner of your business but also an owner of time-tested cost sheets, efficient production methods, unique engineering designs, in nutshell, data or digital assets. This is in the form of your Accounts / ERP data, drawings, spreadsheets, documents, software codes, formulations, and emails. These valuable assets are scattered on your desktops, laptops, mobile phones, and servers.

 

the possibility you can’t afford to ignore

The more you adopt technology, the more digital data do you own. That means, continuity of your business becomes function of how foolproof or unreliable your Data Loss Prevention strategy is. By any chance, you lose your data, business will stop, and enterprise will be under extreme pressure to resume in minimal time. If you can’t, you will be out of business.

Years of hard work, investment in man hours, progress on learning curves, maturity achieved on processes, and analytical data insights will just switch off. It will be a suffocating darkness. Scratch is what you are compelled to start from, that point onwards, but you are not so young, energetic as you were, when you started your business.

Now let us look at, who is your rescuer. He or she could be a junior, under qualified full time or part time IT resource, either on your payroll or employed by your computer maintenance agency.

 

He or she may have done the job diligently to take backup of every laptop, desktop, server NAS and your business may be up and running in reasonable time. What if you get some lame excuse instead of your data? It will be your melting moment, It will be your “Mankad-ed” moment.

Logic Rescues…

 

imagine the situations to conquer

Logically, you cant imagine any more situations than these four situations which can lead to Data Loss. They are,

1. A.      Accidental or intentional deletion of data
2. B.      Ransomware or virus infection
3. C.      Disaster led hardware destruction (server-desktop)
4. D.      Theft or damage of laptop

Let’s minutely check every possibility…

 

Accidental or Intentional Deletion

Sometimes, an ignorant user accidentally or frustrated user intentionally deletes the data. In both situations, you need your digital assets back immediately. You don’t know where to start from as you are not sure the location where data was stored and deleted. It could be user’s desktop, laptop or shared drive on server. It become impossible if you have provided for server backup only and data was stored by user on desktop or laptop.

solution

Let us have a logical perspective on where data is stored, where from data is deleted and in what time-frame we can recover the data lost due to accidental or intentional deletion.

 

Logically, if you are 100% sure that user are storing all data at a specific location, you know where to recover the data from.

We have ideated, developed and commercialized the concept of “Forced Centralization”. This technology defines central storage location for user to store data and user is not left with the choice on where to store data. This makes it 100% data at one place and 0% scatter of data on desktops or laptops or servers.

Logically, the next step is to catch all deleted data in an active recycle bin on central storage which is not accessible to users.

We have ideated, developed and commercialized the concept of “Active Recycle Bin”. This technology retains deleted data by users for defined number of days and available for restore with minimal efforts. This makes enterprise immune of data loss due to accidental or intentional deletion.

Logically, the next step is find who intentionally deleted the data...

We have ideated, developed and commercialized the concept of tagging “who deleted data” inside Active Recycle Bin. This will catch the bad guy in case of intentional deletion of data.

 

Watch for this blog on Data Loss Prevention Strategies with other situations, I will be back soon, To Be Continued…

 

Ransomware of virus infection

Ransomware or Virus is a modern day digital terrorism tactic. Enterprises deploy the best-known antivirus as well as a firewall to prevent data loss.

 

But that is not enough. There is always a zero-day. The day on which new virus/ransomware is floated for which antivirus or firewall is unaware.

 

Infected systems give them samples to the security solutions providers and they release updates in defense. Intermittent exposure can hit and kill (read stop) anyone.

 

I see that most System Integrators or consultants do not have any plan B to this kind of situation in which despite the deployment of antivirus and firewall, enterprise data is infected or encrypted or locked by viruses or ransomware.

 

SOLUTION

 

You need serious plan B. Plan B which assures the fastest possible data restore to establish business continuity.

The most logical plan is Vault and Workspace system implemented to your data structure. We all know that bit-locked systems are almost impossible to penetrate by ransomware or virus.

At the same time, bit-locking is a cumbersome process of locking and unlocking.

 

How about dividing all your data into two parts.

A. frozen data you refer but don't modify

B. Current data continuously updated by the users.

 

If you can do it, anyone can do it by a good one time exercise, you can effectively implement Vault and Workspace strategy.

 

There are devices available in which you can shift your old and frozen data to the vault which is in the state of bit-locked. Your current data is filed on a daily version of a workspace.

At any time, your majority of data is in a vault which is bit-locked and a minority of current data is in workspace filed on a daily workspace, i.e. workspaces of today, yesterday, a day before yesterday, 2 days before yesterday and so on.

Now let us visualize a zero-day situation, you are unfortunately infected by ransomware or virus.

Your vault is unaffected due to its bit-locked state and you can shift to yesterday's workspace (which was infected). At most, you will lose a few hours of data.

To summarize, you need to be proactive and can’t afford to think that your firewall and antivirus will protect your business continuity. You can’t afford to ignore possibility of Zero-Day.

Imagine, you have taken vaccine (read antivirus), so you hope that you will not catch up with the disease (read data loss). At the same time, if you catch up with the disease, vaccine cannot cure the diseases. Vaccine cannot achieve fast recovery (read establish business continuity).

There are devices which can divide your data in vault (bit-locked) and workspace (with regular filing on time machine). You can also program such devices so that data is automatically moved from workspace to vault based on their inactivity in terms of modification data, e.g. workspace files which are not modified since last 180 days.

Antivirus and Firewall are not enough. You can ensure your business continuity and prevent data loss due to virus or ransomware, by practice and by investing in modern day storage devices like BLACKbox.

This is a real strategy with a concrete plan B.

Watch for this blog on Data Loss Prevention Strategies with other situations, I will be back soon, To Be Continued…