Data Security and Data Loss – What Happens Next?

Encryption continues to be the topic on every CIO and IT person’s lips nowadays. No one wants to end up in the news as the next victim of a privacy breach or the next company that didn’t protect its customers’ information. If you conduct a news search using the words “personal data breach,” you’ll be alarmed at the number of instances where personal information such as social security and credit-card numbers have been exposed to possible theft. In a recent breach, a state government site allowed access to hundreds of thousands of records, including names, addresses, social security numbers and documents with signatures.

Whether it’s government agencies, research facilities, banking institutions, credit card processing companies, hospitals–or your company’s computers – the risk of compromising private information is very high.  At the recent “CEO-CIO Symposium,” speaker Erik Phelps from the law firm Michael Best & Friedrich described the relationship business has with technology. In his presentation, he stated that since “business relies so heavily on technology today, business risk becomes technology dependent.” The possibility of litigation is part of business. It has always been a risk of doing business, but because technology and today’s business are so intertwined, business risk has a higher threat level. This has prompted many to encrypt workstations and mobile computers in order to protect critical business data.

If you have rolled out encryption, how do you maintain your IT service quality when the hard disk drive fails? How do you plan and prepare for a data loss when the user’s computer is encrypted?  These are all issues that should be considered when putting together a data disaster plan. In addition, data recovery, one of the more common missing elements of a disaster recovery plan, should also be factored in because it can serve as the “Hail Mary” attempt when all other options have been exhausted.

Data Recovery and Encryption

Business continuity and disaster planning are critical for businesses regardless of their size. Most archive and backup software have key features to restore user files, database stores and point in time snap-shots of users’ files. Software is becoming more automated so users don’t have to manually backup their files. Some computer manufacturers have built-in backup systems that include dedicated hard disk drives for archive storage. Most external USB hard disk drives have some sort of third party software that provides data archiving during a trial time period. Such solutions, while solving the data backup need, create questions regarding how effective the systems are with respect to user data. What are your options when a user’s computer has a data disaster and the hard disk drive is fully encrypted? (more…)

Business systems are usually made up of databases. There are databases for customers, for accounting and for product design. One of the more common database systems is Microsoft’s SQL server. This robust and dynamic system provides a solution to a company’s business system.

The data that is inside a business database is valuable and so is the database itself-it can take weeks or months to set one up completely. When a SQL database cannot access the data, your client’s solution is Ontrack Data Recovery Services. Using specialized tools that we have designed for SQL recoveries plus our Remote Data Recovery™ service, you have a strong data recovery solution. But what is SQL server and what can go wrong?

What is SQL? How is used?
Microsoft® SQL server is a business enterprise software package that manages data through a client/server relational database. There are four fundamental aspects to a SQL (Structured Query Language) server.

1. Database File
2. Relational Database Concept
3. Client/Server System
4. Database Management System (DBMS) (more…)