Data Protection Basics

You don’t know what you’ve got (until you lose it)

First published: February 2011

Some things in life, such as taxes and the music of the younger generation, have been around forever - and yet we are still not comfortable with them. The same can be said of certain areas of business and IT, with the need to protect an organisation’s vital data using a variety of technical mechanisms - backup and recovery, archiving, and so on - springing readily to mind.

There are plenty of ways to lose data, for example, following theft, fire or flood, through human error, computer viruses, hardware failures or security breaches. However, although IT staff have been dealing with data protection challenges for decades, research suggests that only a proportion - perhaps no more than a third - of corporate data is being backed up according to formal policies.