It's silly to lose data this season

With the end of the year in sight, your inbox is bound to be flooded with e-mails about home security, added office security, how to spot the risks and how to stay safe on holiday.

Articles signed by a police commissioner you've never heard of will warn you of cunning tricks crooks deploy to mark your property for special attention. “A can of Coke placed in a specific way”, “a suspicious looking stick” (yes, of course) and a half-eaten Zoo-cookie lying in your parking lot will all be presented as clear proof that you are under immediate threat.

Around our cities, mass hysteria will be followed by the symbolic burning of everything found out of place anywhere near our homes and offices - yet nobody will spare a single thought for their data.

Of course our office desktops are always at risk, even more so during the festive season, but what about our laptops? Our laptops with our lives on it. Our laptops full of next year's plans, this year's results, bank account details, confidential and business critical data?

Accurate figures for South Africa are a scarce thing. We have no official body monitoring cost to company of each laptop stolen, or cost in terms of data breaches. We can get a pretty good idea, however.

USA:
* According to the FBI and the Computer Security Institute, the average cost to company of a stolen laptop (and this was in 2005) was $89 000. That is roughly R620 000 per laptop.
* Currently, over one million laptops are stolen each year. This excludes laptops left in airports, taxis and other public spaces.
* Less than 2% of lost or stolen laptops are ever recovered.
* The FBI themselves lost 300 laptops during the 9-11 commission.

UK:
* According to creativematch.co.uk, over 34 000 laptops are stolen in the UK each year. This is close to 100 per day and only reflects those that are actually reported to authorities.
* The 2008 Ponemon Institute/Dell “Lost and Found” survey revealed that more than 3 300 laptops are lost or stolen at the country's largest airports - each week.
* 6 193 devices, such as laptops, were forgotten in taxis and public places in the last calendar year.

The fact of the matter is that South African users are at just as much risk, if not more, than our American and British counterparts. Sure our companies have backup policies in place that require us to backup to the company's server, but we don't - and here are the reasons for it.

1. We forget or do not know how to back up the data.
2. It takes time.
3. We do not want to save sensitive information on the server where it could be accessed.

So we lose our data (laptop stolen, lost, damaged in some way) and we turn to the IT department for salvation... And, of course, they cannot help because our data is not on the server.

* The great irony is that, should all users decide to follow policy on any given day and back up their data, the company's storage and bandwidth infrastructure could not handle it.

Cibecs is an automated data backup and recovery solution for user data stored on company desktops and laptops. Simply put, Cibecs:

* Eliminates user data loss.
* Reduces cost and downtime when replacing or migrating computers.
* Eradicates waste of company resources needed to find or recreate lost data.
* Decreases infrastructure cost in terms of bandwidth and storage usage.
* Allows IT to offer a substantially better service to desktops and laptop users.

In a nutshell, companies never have to be concerned about the security of their user data. With added operational benefits, automated data encryption, data compression and central management that allow IT full control over all critical data - Cibecs is the simplest way to ensure business continuity.

* Click here to watch a short (3min) video about Cibecs
* Click here to get a FREE 10 user licence of our latest software

Thousands of business users worldwide use Cibecs, including Gijima, Ingram Micro, The NPA, Business Connexion, Unisys, several banking and financial institutions.

Do yourself (and your users) a favour this year and enjoy a carefree holiday... even if there's a big floating balloon that reads “strike here” floating above your office.