Encryption used to be the mainstay of military and other government agencies who need to secure the information they handled preventing anybody who may get access rendering the information useless. Everybody knows about it yet not many use it for the protection of their vital information stores, why? Well there are a hundred reasons why people mistrusts such an extreme measure as encrypting data and one is reliability of technology on which it is used on. Computers as we know have become cheaper and cheaper that has been good on one side but it also raises the risk of failure due to cheaper parts and higher risk for data loss due to failure. I know a lot of people would be going against me on this one but if you have experienced a hard disk crash during my many years of computer use and association with them in my previous line of work as a technical support supervisor, you’d know what I mean.
The technology we have today is of the highest level of quality and technological complexity of the computers I started to work with (386’s and 486’s) but the robustness of these gadgets and gizmos we call peripherals are still quite low except for the extreme types that are too expensive for the ordinary user to afford. Imagine a failed motherboard that has fried circuits, no problem for the hard disks are seldom affected by such incidents. Get the board out and swap it out and you connect the hard disk and you have your data available. Imagine you have a failure in the hard drive itself; you get some software and try to recover that information hoping you get enough of the sensitive files your boss needs in the morning. Now, imagine having a hard disk that was encrypted and had some of its sectors rendered useless, now that’s a nightmare for the encrypted data is useless with the key and the code stored into the hard disk itself.
Passwords and back-up…still the best defense against data loss
Security experts agree and still recommend that passwords be as tough as possible to prevent access to information on computer systems/networks. Yeah, it sounds very redundant and has become a bit tiring to read but it truly is the best protection ever for a computer may it be in the office or home. Encryption is one of the most promising technologies that has swept the IT security arena but even these robust encryption technologies (hardware/software based) protection technologies can be circumvented given enough time and resources.
Some companies have even turned to military-grade encryption which is tough and almost impossible to break but a wrong move along the way (encryption, transmission and decoding) can lead to catastrophic data loss. Carbonite has another approach to data security by actually backing up data offsite from subscriber’s computers may they be corporate or home users. The initial process of copying and indexing may take a few hours or even days depending on the amount of data to be copied but the subsequent back-up process which is simultaneous (which means that it works in the background when there is not much going on in terms of resource use) as one connects to the internet. So you can be working all day and stop fro a few minutes for a coffee break and return to a computer that has all the necessary information backed up by the system automatically.
Data loss due to hardware failure, software corruption due to malicious code (viruses and the likes) and people simply being reckless and deleting information without following the proper assessment of the information still cost a lot of money to recover from and the approach Carbonite uses is a better option. The system uses secure military-grade encryption which even the Carbonite servers cannot break and use adding to it the use of SSL in the transmission of the information for one mean back-up solution. As a user in the article says, it is like getting an insurance policy for your data. More on the said technology in the coming posts so do return and check us out from time to time for more information on the latest and hottest information from all over the world in terms of IT Security. Merry Christmas and a Happy New year to all.
[tags]Data Security, Data Backup, Strong Passwords[/tags]