The last few months have proven to be life-altering in many ways. The work we do, the routines we follow, and anything similar to that has become ambiguous. Such is the impact the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has struck upon us. Quarantine has become a part of our lives, leaving many of us stranded in a strange limbo of sorts.

Big organisations have also been forced to come to a hiatus for a few months now. As a result,organisations around the world have adopted the work from home concept. Work from home, until now, was considered to be an option and a luxury presented by many organisations to their workforce to promote remote-work culture. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, has prompted many to normalise remote work-culture. Yet, it is important to note that this creates a huge window of opportunity for cybercriminals out there. Cybercrimes are highly likely to happen given the vulnerability to access secure and confidential data from individual users remotely.

What’s an optimal solution in this situation?

Plan A is obviously ensuring you have adequate protection via VPN connections or/and an antivirus software in place. But having a Plan B is always a good idea. That’s what is familiarly known as backup.

It is essentially having copies of the original data in the event of data breaches, virus attacks, manual and distributed deletion of an organisation’s data, etc. Data backup entails a series of advantages and many large corporations make it standard procedure to have a dedicated centralised data backup infrastructure.

However, a backup system isn’t restricted to big organisations. Individual users of the Internet are always interconnected within the organisation through their local network.

Data recovery frameworks, on the other hand, are complementary to data backup systems. Once secure data is backed up in a remote location or in a physical location, a time comes when the data needs to be re-accessed. Recovery systems serve as storage mediums to access the copies of data stored.

How important is data backup and recovery in the current WFH culture?

Most IT companies predicted the need for remote working culture by the next decade. The COVID-19 health crisis has escalated and mandated the immediate need for working from home. With the workforce transcending to remote-working, this raises some serious concerns regarding data safety and credibility.

Companies and individuals, at large, have a practice of investing in data backup and recovery systems for fear of losing their sensitive data. Although such an event may rarely occur, it is a necessary system required to be in place to regain data, in the worst-case scenario.

Taking action towards saving your personal data is now more important than ever. There are many types of solutions that underline the importance of data backup. Let’s look into the available modes of data backup and recovery:

● External drive backup: Commonly known as external storage systems, saving your data to a physical storage device guarantees you that your personal data, applications, software and other login access credentials to organisations stays intact. Although this is a very effective method of backing up your original data, it also ensures that data can be recovered in case there is a digital breach to your systems. Hard drives, thumb drives, and flash drives are some commonly used external drives for data backup.

● Cloud backup: These digital storage systems are sophisticated and quintessential for organisations for safe storage and handling of digital data. Cloud backup stores any amount of data to a virtual cloud via the Internet. This makes data accessibility much easier without relying on physical storage systems. Unlike physical storage systems that tend to get lost in the event of natural calamities or human errors, a cloud backup relatively minimises the loss of data.

● Hybrid backup: This combines the pros of both physical backup and cloud backup. Your data is primarily backed up to a local device and then, to a virtual data centre for contingency access. As old habits are hard to keep away from, once you store your data to a local device, it is suggested that you automatically enable your data to get stored in the cloud. This action doesn’t hamper the existing data setup or anything. You are just doubling your data security for unprecedented circumstances.

More than ever, remote workers are highly targeted by cyber criminals to pose malicious threats to your personal data. The new work from home culture comes with a lot of challenges, mostly digital, but as we adjust to this changing work landscape, it is important for a company to adjust their security policies too.

Author Bio:

Cara Srivastava

Cara is currently pursuing her Masters in Marketing Communications and working part-time as a Copywriter at Newpath Web. Writing is her jam — especially if it needs a creative spin! Beyond the internet, Cara loves spending time thinking of new potential names for her house plants; Taylor Smint, Hazel the Basil and Samuel.