And it’s not even as if losing information is an unusual phenomenon, either: most people are well aware of the fragility of laptops and their hard drives, and the constant threat of potential theft. The IT guys are definitely aware of it.
Backup might be a vital activity, but despite almost anyone who has a computer of any sort being well aware of its necessity, it remains the ugliest sister of technology tasks. It just isn’t any fun at all and it also requires a level of diligence usually reserved for saints. Laptop backup in particular has traditionally been in the ‘too hard’ basket – managing large numbers of highly mobile devices across different connections simply takes too much time using traditional methods.
You probably know exactly what I’m getting at – is your laptop data protected? Probably not.
That leaves your laptop (and by extension, the whole company’s laptops) as a massive weak point for the business. If a senior person’s machine broke or went missing, could your company survive?
The answer to that question is academic (until there is a catastrophic data loss without a backup) but it should get you thinking. You know the information on mobile devices is probably the most critical in the business. You know it should be protected. You know the last ‘memory stick’ backup you did disappeared into a desk drawer somewhere. And you don’t know how well your colleagues have done in backing up their data (though you can probably guess).
But just what should you do about it?
The answer is a lot simpler than you may ever have thought. Software is capable of remembering all the things we can’t be bothered with and it also keeps time far better than any human. Even better, with cloud computing, there is a very, very secure place where company data can reside. Combine the two and to get automated backups which take care of every item of information, continuously (so long as you’re connected to the internet), securely and best of all, without any administrative overhead at all. For your personal device and those of all your colleagues.
What it delivers, in addition to data protection, is ease of management, deployment, monitoring and governance. These are essential requirements for larger corporations and for any business which takes its data seriously.
Should a device break, get lost or stolen, just get a replacement, and restore the information from the cloud.
Your laptop could kill your business. But if it did, it wouldn’t be the fault of the laptop – if it’s a culprit you’re after, just take a look in the mirror.
