Data Insurance Protects Your Business’ Most Valuable Asset

Taking steps to make sure that your business is protected against any and every potential disaster is nothing more than common sense. It’s standard practice to have policies and contingencies in place to keep what we value most both safe and secure in the event that something unexpected happens, because the last thing you want is to find yourself unprepared to deal with an unpleasant situation. It’s why you have home, auto, and business insurance policies. You want to be ready for anything.

The insurance that protects your business is focused on the physical aspects of your operations. Your building is protected in the event of an incident like a fire or flood, and content insurance can help you to replace desks and chairs, and hardware such as computers and servers. If a broken pipe were to wreck your office, you would be able to bounce back thanks to the benefits offered to you by your business insurance policy.

But as essential as things like laptops and servers are to your operations, they’re not the asset you should be the most concerned about protecting – it’s the data those devices store that is truly valuable to your business. Regardless of how big or small your business is, the industry you operate within, or the products or services you provide, it’s your mission-critical data that keeps your business moving forward. And since most or all of that data exists primarily or entirely in a digital format? You need to have data insurance protecting every last file.

Catastrophic data loss is one of the top causes of business failure. You need access to information such as client data, financial data, inventory, and sales records in order to function, and when that data suddenly vanishes thanks to a network crash or cyber attack, your operations are left at a standstill. The longer your staff is forced to go without access to needed files, the more that lost productivity and profit are going to sting. And when you can’t restore access to that data at all, a fried server isn’t an inconvenience anymore – it could very well be the killing blow to your business.

Data insurance is a little different from traditional business insurance. Rather than paying a monthly premium to an insurance company in order to have the needed funds and support to recover from a disaster scenario, data insurance takes a proactive approach to safeguarding your information. If you’re familiar with the term ‘data backups’, you already know more about what data insurance is and how it works than you might realize.

Effective data insurance hinges on having several different policies and safeguards in place. Your business needs to take steps to ensure that routine and comprehensive backups are being made of all important files. Ideally, redundancy is a part of your routine as well, with copies of your data being stored both onsite (for example, files created and stored on employee workstations being copied over to a central server) and offsite (copies of files stored on your onsite servers being backed up to an offsite or cloud-based server). This redundancy protects your files from threats that could damage or destroy onsite hardware, and offers more flexibility should you find yourself needing to restore data from those backups.

Backups that are stored on a server or servers that are separate from your network also offer the added benefit of insulating those backups from cyber threats such as ransomware or other malicious programs that can corrupt, erase, or even steal data stored on infected systems and servers. It’s important to keep in mind that in the same way that most of your data is intangible, many of the threats to that data are intangible as well. It’s not enough to only prepare for physical dangers when you invest in data insurance.

Protecting your mission-critical data and having a plan in place that will allow your staff to access important files quickly and easily when something happens to throw off your usual routine is a necessity, and it’s the reason that backups are only a part of what data insurance offers your business. A top notch data insurance plan does much more than just save copies of important files to a secure location; it provides your business with the means to work around any obstacle that could potentially derail your business day.

The ability to restore lost or corrupted files to servers and workstations quickly means your employees can get back to taking care of your customers with minimal delays. And when both your data and your office are out of commission, your business needs to have a means of setting up shop at a secondary location to offer some facsimile of business as usual to customers while you work on getting things back to normal. The primary goal of a data insurance is to make a crisis as painless as possible by helping your business handle a less than ideal situation with as little disruption to your operations as can be managed.

Partnering with an IT support provider is a great way to ensure your business has the best data insurance available. A team of experienced technology professionals can create and implement a data backup and recovery plan that is tailored to the specific requirements of your business, and work with you to build contingencies that will allow you to shrug off any crisis. Business insurance is about picking up the pieces and starting over, but data insurance is about protecting what you have and making sure you never have to go without valuable business data – no matter what.

In need of data insurance for your Colorado Springs business? Get in touch with the Colorado Computer Support team at blake@coloradosupport.com or (719) 355-2440. We’re the data security experts area businesses trust.