Critical Data Archives - Tech Prognosis Blog

Your Business and the CIA Triad: What’s your Status?

September 1, 2010 by Daniel Ihonvbere

The CIA triad is an information systems security term that refers to the critical task of data protection. The core goal of information security is to assure the confidentiality, integrity and availability of all the sensitive data kept by an organization. That’s critical for the continuity of business operations, as well as legally and ethically required.
So what is the CIA triad?
It provides for safely using paper- and computer-based data systems, email, fax machines, telephones, web browsers, and even just talking out loud through the provision of:

Confidentiality of data – where you ensure that critical data is only accessed by people with proper approval and on a need to know basis.
Confidentiality is related to the broader concept of data privacy – the act of limiting access to Personally Identifiable Information (PII). In the US, a range of state and federal laws, with abbreviations like FERPA, FSMA, and HIPAA, set the legal terms of privacy.

SMBs and Business Continuity Plans

August 21, 2010 by Daniel Ihonvbere

Question: What is the cost of a hardware failure to your business? If you are like most business owners, you are already calculating the cost of the server, hard drive, installation cost etc. But is that really the cost to your business? To put it another way, what would it cost you to replace the DATA that was lost? That, to me, is the actual cost. How many months will it take to re-enter your accounting or customer data for example if your server’s hard drive were to simply kaput and become unavailable? For those lucky ones who have not experienced it, pray it does not happen to you. For those of us who have experienced it, we know it will never happen again, right?

Business owners have a false sense of security when it comes to the issue of Business Continuity which is often thought of as just an IT (Information Technology) problem. “We have a good backup system so we are fine”. There is often the tendency to overlook flaws on business processes, application development, and logistics.

Backup Options for Small Business Owners

April 6, 2016May 26, 2009 by Daniel Ihonvbere

You’ve heard it a thousand times: backup your data. But I still find it rather amazing to walk into a client’s environment and ask, “so what do you do for backup?” and get a blank stare or “oh, we are doing ok”.

The “it will never happen to us” syndrome is prevalent in the small business environment. The result is a constant break-fix scenario that ultimately turns out to be very costly.

The cost of hard drives has fallen so dramatically that it is inexcusable for a small business owner not to have at least, a removable USB drive for backing up critical data. There are even “cloud” offerings that are pretty reasonable, although they tend to be very slow especially if you have multi-gigabyte files to backup.

For example, Carbonite will back up any amount of data you have for about $55 a year, while Mozy (owned by Iomega/EMC) offers 2 gigabytes of free storage for those who purchase an Iomega external drive.