Build a Solid House for Digital Records: Data Management FAQs
Storing paper records in a cardboard box next to a fireplace or in the basement of a house in a flood zone are both recipes for disaster. How do you know that your digital records are not stored in the online equivalent of those situations? The information you collect and store about your customers, employees and organization should be protected beyond a doubt.
Learn the Data Management Basics
Find out the current status of your data to ensure your organization isn’t taking on unnecessary risk. First, we’ll explore the basics of data management by answering common questions before we examine data management services.
What is data retention?
Data retention is the practice of storing data for a set period. For example, you may store customer data for 5 years and internal documents for 3 years. In many industries, data retention best practices are governed by compliance requirements.
What is a compliance framework?
A compliance framework is a structured set of guidelines that ensures an organization follows the necessary processes to meet all regulations and specifications that apply to the organization.
Organizations may need to follow different regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA). In this example, the organization’s compliance framework includes the processes necessary to meet the requirements of both acts.
What is a disaster recovery plan?
A disaster recovery plan is a specific set of processes tailored to your organization that detail the steps to follow in case a disaster, such as a data breach, occurs. Your disaster recovery plan should be both customized to your organization and updated to reflect any changes to your IT ecosystem.
For instance, if your disaster recovery plan was established in January, but in June, you begin using a new software program for essential operations, your disaster recovery plan should be immediately updated to detail how data from that program will be recovered.
Discover your baseline information security best practices
How often should we do restore tests?
Restoring a backup takes a significant amount of time and effort; therefore, many traditional MSPs don’t perform these critical tests as frequently as they should. Your organization should run a data restore test more frequently than once or twice a year. Some organizations run a restore test after each backup.
How should I structure my data?
The days of giving every employee access to every document should be long gone. Your data permissions should be structured on a role basis. Users should be sorted into groups and then permissions granted based on the group. There should be no implicit permissions per employee; only per role. Strategic SharePoint document management is critical to keeping your data safe.
How do I audit permissions?
Auditing permissions is essential to protecting your data. First, establish a baseline of where you started with your permissions when you set up your system and then analyze what has changed. Do you have new employees? Were they sorted into the correct user group? Does each user group have appropriate permissions?
Net-Tech recommends auditing your permissions every quarter starting at the baseline.
Outsourcing Your Data Management Services
Now that we’ve covered the basics, we’ll take a closer look at what data management services look like and how they can protect your information.
Why should I outsource my data management?
You can’t just store your data in a cloud and then expect the cloud to both meet cybersecurity standards and expect your data to be consistently backed up. Data management requires a significant amount of time and expertise. Outsourcing your data management takes the burden off of your organization.
What cost benefits will I receive by outsourcing my data management?
With data management services from Net-Tech, small and mid-sized businesses will enjoy enterprise-level features without the cost. Outsourcing can also result in cost efficiency as you won’t have to hire a full internal IT team. Lastly, our data retention strategy ensures that our clients get the maximum value out of services like AWS and Azure.
What misconceptions should I be aware of about Azure/AWS?
Once your data is stored in Azure or AWS, you might think it’s automatically safe and backed up. However, data storage and data management are two separate tasks. Azure and AWS are similar to banks that store your money without offering any sort of financial advice. They don’t offer strategic guidance for your data storage, and Azure only keeps backups for 3 months.
Are you falling for these common misconceptions of SharePoint?
How Net-Tech Approaches SharePoint Integration
Many MSPs allow you to store your data in SharePoint without any customization. They turn on SharePoint and allow you to push data in with no further processes. All of a sudden, there’s a major data sprawl and confusion about how to organize the data. It’s equivalent to building a house without any regard for specific needs and then just shoving items inside.
We Build a Solid House for SharePoint Document Management
At Net-Tech, we don’t work with a house with a foundation that’s cracked beyond repair. We rebuild from the ground up. If you don’t know how your house was built, it’s extremely difficult to ensure security after the fact.
If your SharePoint site setup was never documented and your data has sprawled, it’s more cost-effective to build a new house and migrate all of your existing data into the new house that has the documentation clearly established. If you just throw data into your sites, your data management won’t be much better than a hoarder house. Similarly, if you don’t know where your data is and who has access to it, analyzing and establishing security is very difficult.
Our team at Net-Tech comes in and builds a house for your data based on our best-practice blueprints. We move all the files into the new house until there’s nothing in the old system. During this process, we check that we’re changing everything that needs to be changed to align with cybersecurity best practices.
We take your SharePoint document management seriously. Net-Tech doesn’t just apply pre-existing keys to your data needs; we customize keys so that your data is strategically organized and protected. Your SharePoint sites will be structured based on our innovative file-sharing methodology.
Net-Tech Is Your Data Management Architect and Builder
Procrastinating your data management problems only leads to more serious issues. You’re at a higher risk for internal data breaches and your organization will waste time on redundant processes. At Net-Tech, we take your cybersecurity seriously and we value your time. Our approach to data management includes automation, robust compliance and faster onboarding through standardized processes.
