Mine, either.

I wouldn’t even consider it. To the contrary, when I hear the occasional tale about some guy’s heirs who found piles of cash in his home, I usually chuckle.

The fact is that you keep your money in a financial institution for at least three reasons:

1. It’s safer, because they spend a ton more on security than you do.

2. It’s also safer because a dishonest or disgruntled employee can’t abscond with it or burn it up.

3. It’s much more convenient, because you can use it from almost anywhere via a check, credit card, or ATM machine.

Now ask yourself which is your more valuable asset: your cash, or your data? (Hint: which one would do more damage to your business if you lost it?) Right. So why don’t you treat your data at least as well as your cash?

I have a pretty deep background in data security(*). What I’ve learned along the way is that most businesses (1) don’t think enough about the security of their data, and (2) when they do, they tend to think in physical terms (“If I can see it, it’s secure”).

The problem is, data is virtual, not physical, and as such you need to think about it differently.

As is true in physical security, the biggest risk is an inside job – either a dishonest employee, or a disgruntled one. But unlike physical assets, data can be copied perfectly, which means that it can be stolen although you still have it – in other words, you may not even know it’s gone. On the other hand, if it’s erased, it’s gone gone gone: you may catch the person who did it, but you won’t get the data back.

The next biggest risk is accidental data destruction: inadvertent erasure, or hard-drive failure. Be honest, now: do you have a current backup of your critical business data located in a different physical location? One that’s sufficiently current that you could be back up and running and not lose more than a day’s work?

Me, either. ;^) Which is why I keep my data online whenever I can.

What about hackers? The reality is that they’re just not an issue for small businesses. While there are some spectacular break-ins, hackers understandably target places where there is a rich wad of data: millions of credit card or social security numbers, for example. Your business data may be worth something to a competitor or an angry ex-employee, but it isn’t valuable to a hacker. As long as you’re using a secure connection to access your online data (https, not http), you’re safe.

And what about not being able to get online? Again, this is almost a non-factor at this point. Internet connectivity has reached the reliability of dialtone, and with the spread of WiFi you’re never more than a coffee shop away from a connection.

Bottom line: not only is your data vastly safer online (assuming that the place it sits treats your data the way banks treat your money), but because you can access your data from anywhere, you’ll also discover whole new levels of convenience, flexibility, and power for you and everyone else in your company.

(*) Prior to starting NetBooks, I ran one of the leading network security companies (nCircle), and consulted to global companies like Visa. I also hold two patents on bicycle locks!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 9:01 am and is filed under Operations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.