Three Simple Steps to Protect Your Data from Accidental Deletion

Penny Conway

Over the past few years, your inboxes, social media feeds, and targeted Web banners have been filled with warnings of cyberattacks. Chances are your IT department has piled on the security subscriptions on the network and devices in the name of zero-day attacks. What many IT leaders may be underestimating though, is the potential threat with unfettered access that may have been on the last Microsoft Teams meeting with them.  

In 2008, an employee of an architectural firm in Florida walked into her office one night and erased 7 years of worth of blueprints and drawings—worth $2.5 million. The reason: she thought the company was trying to replace her (they weren’t, oops!). 

In May of 2021, a part time employee for a New York Credit Union deleted roughly 21.3GB of data—including files and directories. The reason: she was fired and two days later her access still wasn’t revoked by the IT support firm.

The truth is, data loss isn’t always about protecting yourself from malicious outside attacks. The threat could be internal, and not even be malicious like the examples above. Every day, millions of employees are sitting in their homes, accessing and generating new company data in Excel, Word, or PowerPoint and sharing it all through tools like Outlook and Teams. Their kids, spouses, crazy uncles—even the family dog—are just a few mouse clicks away from accidentally deleting something important. Sure, you could rely on the Recycle Bin for immediate restoration, but what about a loss that goes unnoticed beyond 30 days? Microsoft’s shared responsibility matrix clearly lays it out. You are responsible for your data. Consider taking these easy steps to protect it.

  1. Take account of your data sources—like Office 365—and have at least two additional copies of the data, plus the original.
  2. Keep that data on two different media types. One great idea is to have a copy of that data moved into Azure or another cloud platform.
  3. Leverage a turn-key solution (like Veeam Backup for Office 365) when deploying Office 365  that allows you to seamlessly move the data back and forth—or access when you have a data loss.

As your partner, we can help you with backing up your data with professional one-time services or ongoing managed services. With your data growing rapidly by the day— don’t wait for something to happen to form a plan.

Penny has a passion for enabling digital transformation through cloud solutions and services. With a background in managed services for hardware and software across the partner ecosystem, she seeks to break down complex solutions into industry-relevant conversations with customers regardless of where they are on their cloud journey. When she isn’t networking on LinkedIn, or hosting podcasts and webcasts, she really enjoys cooking and having dance parties with her daughter.

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