Lost data can cause a major crisis or lead to business failure for your practice. But who is responsible for data security for your practice? IT? Software provider? Practice Manager?
The answer should be, every member of your team. Taking responsibility is one thing, but how do you ensure your team know the correct steps to take to protect your data and the risks at stake when things go wrong.
Keeping your team in the know and ensuring everyone knows what’s expected of them is key. So to help you protect your practice we asked our technical experts to share the three most common misconceptions around data backup within the practices we work with. Debunking these popular and often risky myths around data backup can be the first step to help you and your team learn new habits and unlearn those that unknowingly put your data security at risk.
1. You only need one form of data backup
Your valuable client and patient data isn’t truly protected from loss unless you back it up regularly to more than one location. You may feel safe having a robust onsite backup, or you may believe that having a copy of your data stored remotely in the cloud is sufficient. However, best practice is to have both a secure offsite and onsite backup.
On top of this, another good practice is data redundancy. This is where the same piece of data is held in two separate places. This could be two different fields within a single database, or two different spots in multiple software platforms. This helps to safeguard data and promote consistency.
2. It’s okay to miss the occasional data backup
In a busy veterinary practice, critical client and patient data is constantly being saved to your practice management software. Further, all of your financial transactions and future appointments are also being recorded.
If you were to miss just one backup and lose an entire day’s data, what would the implications be for your business? What if the backup process failed for two days or even a week? Unfortunately, your business may not have the time or financial resources to recover.
A recent report found that 60% of companies that lost their data shut down within six months of the disaster. A secure data backup solution can help ensure this does not happen to your business.
3. You can rely on a manual backup process
Relying on your team to run manual data backups at the end of each day is extremely risky. Just one missed backup due to forgetfulness, illness, or vacation could coincide with an unforeseen significant event at your practice, which could place your practice at risk of financial or reputational damage. An automated data backup solution takes care of your vital practice data securely and in the background. These modern solutions provide automatic, scheduled backups that let you ‘set and forget’.
Knowing you have a secure data backup will give you both peace of mind and protect and restore your valuable practice data if a worst-case scenario happened.
We know that lost productivity, unrecoverable digital assets, and lost consumer confidence can be hugely damaging to any business. By addressing these three common misconceptions about data backup, your practice is immediately in a better position to protect your business and valuable data.
Our data backup solution is a safe, reliable and affordable way to help prevent your business from losing data. We offer an automated service which works in the background to store your data remotely, providing full-circle protection for your practice.
Contact us to learn more our full-circle data backup solutions.
Source: Techopedia