Data Recovery Services Constitute a Business Opportunity With Increasing Potential – Part Two

This is part two of the article. In part one, we looked at the critical role of data in enabling continued business operations, the ease with which data on computers can get lost and how lost data is recovered. In this concluding part, we look at how to protect data so that it does not get lost, and can be easily recovered if it does get lost. We also take a brief look at the requirements for starting a data recovery services business.

Protecting Your Data

Data can be protected in various ways.

 

• • Install security software and procedures that restrict data access only to authorized persons. The security system will also keep an audit trail of who accessed a piece of data and what the person did with it

 

• • Install antivirus and firewall software, and maintain them up-to-date. These types of security walls can make it extremely difficult for malicious external software to reach your data

 

• • Backup all data in a systematic manner. A systematic approach can reduce the pain (and system downtimes) of backing up while ensuring that all data is in a recoverable backup media. It will also ensure that relevant backups can be located comparatively easily

 

• Keep the data and applications with specialist third party agencies that focus on providing application and data storage services. Good providers will typically attend to data protection measures in a way that is more effective than in-house efforts

 

If a backup is available, lost data can be recovered through data restore programs. If the backups are maintained in remote locations, such recovery is possible even in the case of natural disasters or a serious fire incident at the main office.

A major data-related threat that is emerging is identity theft. This does not involve destruction of data. Instead, the identity thieves use various means to get sensitive data like your credit card and bank account numbers, and the passwords you use. With this information, they can drain your funds. The firewall mentioned above can help you with this issue. So can anti-spyware and data encryption. However, the major protection measure is the care you use when entering your credit card numbers etc into the computer. Enter them only into secure HTTPS Web pages that transmit the data in an encrypted form that can be decrypted only by the authorized recipient.

Organizing a Data Recovery Service Business

The discussion so far would have given you an idea about the wide prevalence of data loss and the business-critical importance of recovering the lost data. The demand for data recovery and data protection services is increasing at a fast pace, as quantified at the beginning of the first part of this article. If you can organize a data recovery and protection services business, you will be tapping into a profitable market.

As in any business, successful marketing will be key for success in this business. In the case of data-related services, the client will be entrusting sensitive data to your care. That means the client needs to be convinced about your integrity and data safety measures  data hk in addition to your competence.

That said, you need:

 

• • Technical Know-How: Data storage devices can vary from old fashioned floppy disks to modern RAID arrays under which many disks work together appearing as a single logical disk. Data can be written to these devices by varied operating systems such as UNIX, Windows, Linux and more. Under each of these systems, data can be created by varied applications such as office suites, ERP packages and e-mail programs. Will you be able to organize the technical skills needed to cater to such a varied scenario?

 

• Marketing Plan: How are you going to locate potential clients and persuade them to let you handle their data recovery assignments? Business data is sensitive by nature and there have been reported cases of data security breaches occurring at data recovery firms. Can you organize a strong marketing plan to gain the trust of clients in your integrity as well as your technical competence?