In today’s workplace, stealing information does not require a covert Special Forces team: It is often done by an employee armed with a 5 GB USB flash drive. Your unsecured, unencrypted network invites a hacker to compromise a server or workstation holding sensitive data. However; you dont have to be vulnerable. Fortunately, there are plenty of options available today for securing/encrypting your data; many of these options are just overlooked.
Encrypting your data does not have to be an expensive rollout like moving from NT 4.0 to Active Directory. There are many types of encryption, from complete encryption at the enterprise level down to the often overlooked encryption of an individual's workstation. With so many options, your perfect solution is surely available.
Encryption is as important as a firewall. You would not leave your network unprotected by a firewall. It is obviously as foolish as giving a hacker your enterprise or domain administrative password. You also should not leave your sensitive data unencrypted; encryption ensures that your data is secure.
How, specifically, might encryption be useful to you? When you send an email of sensitive information, encryption provides security that no unauthorized parties have access to your data. If your password is encrypted, it cannot be duplicated by anyone else, so it ultimately proves your identity when you sign on to a computer or use a smart card or an RSA device.
When you sign an email with an encrypted signature, the email cannot be changed or modified without changing the digital signature. Using digital signatures provides you with proof that a document has not been compromised. Encryption can be used for email exchange as well as to encrypt documents on your hard drive. Encryption is used when logging onto a system, SSL connections on the web, and on anything that is sensitive within your business model. Not having an encryption plan may not quite stop you dead in your tracks as failure to have disaster recovery did for some, but it could cause your stock to fall, profits to decline, and peace of mind to be shattered. Do yourself a favor and configure an encryption plan for your company today.
Protect your data with backups
One of the most important ways you can protect yourself from disaster is to back up your data. Strategies for data redundancy can range from something as simple and rudimentary as periodically saving copies to CD to complex, staggered, periodic automated backups to a server. On systems that must maintain constant uptime without loss of service, RAID can provide automatic failover redundancy in case of a disk failure. Free backup tools, such as rsync and Bacula, are available for putting together automated backup schemes.
Version control systems, such as Subversion, can provide flexible data management so that you can not only have backups on another computer, but you can keep more than one desktop or laptop system up to date with the same data without a great deal of difficulty. Using Subversion in this manner saved my bacon in 2004 when my working laptop suffered a catastrophic drive failure, emphasizing the importance of regular backups of critical data.