Much of the misfortune experienced by government offices can be blamed on outside forces: Budget cuts, a natural disaster, a decision by a top official to leave the organization. No surprise that the organizations that are best able to navigate and recover quickly from these incidents are typically the ones that minimized risk by taking basic precautions. One of the most basic of all is protecting critical data. Just imagine walking into your office one morning and discovering all of your public information records, personnel information, and regulatory compliance data had disappeared. How long would it take you to recover? How much disruption and delay would occur? What would it cost the government and American taxpayers to restore? Data loss can and does happen. It can result from hardware failure, flood, fire, security breaches, or just an accidental deletion of an important file. Whatever the cause, taking precautions to reduce the impact is like an insurance policy, enabling your office to get back up and running quickly. Basic steps you can take
There are numerous ways to safeguard critical information and data, but these three methods will get you started:
1. Implement a procedure to back up critical data Backing up data means making a copy of it on another medium. For example, you might burn all of you important files onto a CD-ROM or second hard drive. There are two basic kinds of backups: Full backup and incremental backup. A full backup makes a complete copy of the selected data onto another medium. An incremental backup backs up only data that has been added or changed since the last full backup.
A full backup augmented by incremental backups is generally quicker and takes less storage space. You might consider a policy of running a full backup on a weekly basis followed by daily incremental backups. However, when you want to restore data after a crash, it will take longer. You first have to restore the full backup, and then each incremental backup. If this is a concern, another option is to run a full backup nightly. Just automate it to run after hours.
It's a good idea to test your backups frequently by actually restoring data to a test location. Doing this will:
- Help to ensure backup media and backed-up data are in good shape
- Identify problems in the restoration process
- Provide a level of confidence that is useful during an actual crisis
Figure 1 shows a Windows operating system Backup utility, a built-in tool to make backups easier. Figure 1 2. Establish permissions Both your operating system and your servers can provide protection against data loss due to employee activities. With Windows XP, Windows 2000 Server, and Windows Small Business Server 2003, it is possible to assign users different permission levels based on their roles and responsibilities within your organization. Rather than giving all users Administrator access (which is not a best practice for maintaining a security enhanced environment), institute a practice least privilege policy. Do this by configuring your servers to give individual users access to specific programs only, and by specifically defining user privileges. 3. Encrypt sensitive data Encrypting data means that you convert it into a form that disguises the data. Encryption is used to help ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the data when storing it or moving it across a network. Only authorized users have the tools to decrypt encrypted files. And only authorized users can access these files. Encryption complements other access control methods and provides an added level of protection for improving data security on computers that might be at risk to theft (such as mobile computers and files shared on a network). Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 support Encrypting File System to encrypt files and folders.
Together these three practices can provide the level of protection most government organizations require to improve data security. | |
