Protecting your data on the go: have you backed up your data yet?

Employees today are more mobile, always working on the move. They need to be able to contact their team and access their business data without restriction, wherever and whenever. But with the increase in the number of mobile devices comes an increase in the risks to data security. You want some sort of guarantee that your company’s data is still secure the moment your employees leave the office door, whatever device they are using, but without hampering team productivity.

Mobile working isn’t just about working from home anymore; it’s about working anywhere other than the usual desk at the company office. “Mobile working is happening inside and outside of the company, it’s informal and it’s dispersed, it’s essentially working more spontaneously, and the boundaries are becoming more blurred,” explained Flore Pradère-Saulnier, head of research at JLL, in an article published in French financial newspaper Les Echos.

Mobile working – a continuing trend

70% of managers work outside their office at least once a month, according to business blog Ciel Mon Bureau. A study conducted by Ipsos in 2016 revealed that 65% of office workers are interested in mobile working. And this trend is continuing year after year.

Thanks to new digital tools available, employees are finding it easier to work on the move. Although mobile working boosts efficiency, there does need to be caution when it comes to the data used – especially given the number of cyberattacks only continues to grow. A report by American company Cisco shows that there is now eleven times more malicious software circulating on the internet compared to last year. In 2017, the firm counted 224 new types of malware.

Back up, back up, back up

Security is a major concern when employees work on the go. They need to work safe in the knowledge that the data they use is not at risk. Data must be no less secure when working on the move than working back at the office. And the best way to protect your business data is with an solution. A tool like this needs to allow employees working away or on the move to back up their data remotely, without any adverse effect on their work.

Managing backup agents remotely

In order to meet the specific needs of mobile users, an online backup solution should at least provide three certain features. First, administrators must be able to manage their agents remotely. Since users can be located anywhere in the world, it’s impossible to get hold of every single one of their laptops to make configuration changes, one by one. That’s why it’s important for the solution to contain a remote configuration console that can not only configure the backup agents for PCs, but also monitor them to ensure everything is working properly and raise the alarm when any problems arise so they can be resolved, even remotely.

Second, an online backup solution needs to guarantee data protection, even on unstable and weak networks. It must allow data to be backed up locally whenever the network is down and resume online data backup when the network is up and running again. Third, in order to run on weak and unstable networks too, the solution must be able to optimize data through incremental backup.

Preventing incidents

In order to get your business up and running again after the loss, theft, or destruction of a laptop, the solution needs to offer a bare metal restore (BMR). This type of backup allows you to restore all of your data, plus the operating system and the configuration, on hardware similar to the original device. So, even in critical cases, employees can get back to work in no time as if nothing had ever happened.