Part 1: Discussion    500 words. APA Format

Search “scholar.google.com” for a company or school that has reported issues, problems, concerns about their backup procedures. Discuss the issue of securing backups. There have been several incidents lately in which backup media containing personal customer information were lost or stolen. How should backup media be secured? What about off-site storage of backups?

Reply to post 1:   300 Words

Being at this point in time, the data to be backed up is huge for almost every company, which contains in itself not only information about the firm but also personal information of the employees. These can be accessed from various online platforms but also, they may be misused. The greater the number of people involved in the back-up data, the higher the risk, that is, the more the number of people, the more uncontrollable the breach would be. For example, when there was a breach in the systems of Arkansas University in 2014, a total number of 50,000 people were affected. No doubt that is a huge number but when it is compared to a number of people who were affected at the data breach of eBay in the same year, it seems to be a very small number. A total number of 145 million people were affected in the eBay data breach, whose emails, address and other information were accessible easily and could have been misused. The first issue that arises for a company is when they plan out how the data of the company, the employees and the personal information of the customers must be backed-up (Hart et al., 2016).

    The selection of the back-up process is very important as it is the first step of a back-up process and making one error in judgment will lead to the failure of the whole process and risk of the personal information leaking out. The officials who are assigned to the security definitely know how protecting the backed-up files can be daunting. Securing back-ups is the most difficult part of a back-up procedure because the security needs to be kept updated at every interval or its firewalls will come down crashing leading to breach of security thus, leaking information. To keep the back-up process more secured, the plan should be kept at a single accessing point, that is, it should be operated through one system. If it is however not possible to do so, the security of the systems that are being used should be at the maximum. The developers of the plan should not be careless because there have been several cases where the files get deleted by mistake even before the back-up had been done or worse the backup gets deleted (Menard, Gatlin & Warkentin, 2014).

Off-site storage of backups

Technology has its uses and abuses, so with time as the security for the back-up processes are being raised so are several viruses and malware are rising. So, to keep the back-up secures, a company should keep all the virus definition updated and dismiss any obsolete system that comes up in the way of doing so. The safest and most convenient way to back-up any data nowadays is through off-site back-ups. Off-site back-up is a brilliant process of backing up data to a media that is taken to an off-site location or is backed-up in a server. Cloud Storage is an Off-site back-up that helps to keep several data safe and can be reached by the host at their convenience. It has high security thus minimizing the risk of a breach, thus, this process is taking up the market faster (Lackey, A. E., Pandey, Moshiri, Lalwani, Lall & Bhargava, 2014).

Reply to post 2:  300 Words

Securing of data back ups

    In today’s world where technology is growing so fast, companies have to plan a lot about their back-up processes and its security. There are several challenges in the market for all the companies, be it in small or big scale. And to survive in the market all these challenges not only must be faced but won over. Such a challenge is to keep the back-up plan and procedure secured. In 2008, there were several records that were compromised on the basis of back-up mistakes. And all those caused a lot of personal breaches towards the consumers of those companies. Making a back-up plan is the first step and the most difficult part comes after the plan has been made. There can be several issues which may cause problems in securing back-up. The data that is being used to create the back-up plan may be corrupted somehow causing the whole plan to be sabotaged. Technology may have advanced through the years and humans have tried to upgrade themselves with it but we are all still human and there are some mistakes that are bound to happen (Ristov, Mrvica & Miskovic, 2014, May).

The process of securing media backup

    Another important thing to be kept in mind during a back-up process is that consumers always demand privacy and security, which is not wrong in their parts as they are trusting a company with their personal details. In countries like India, the online market was still seen with fear, not even a few years back. The privacy of a person may be compromised if the personal details like home address, mobile phone number and other details about a person are leaked. To deal with these sorts of problems the company must ensure that the back-ups are perfectly secured and cannot be compromised in any way. The data usually keeps increasing and it needs to be updated and to go a little easy on the budget of the company the back-up process must be cost-effective. There are several ways in which a back-up plan can be made, but while making it the most important thing that needs to be kept in mind is that it should have a global view. Back-ups can be secured in many ways. Storing the back-up plan is not a problem nowadays generally but to secure it the company must take into account the people who have access to the plan. There should also be transparency in the company and the employees must be very devoted to rule out the option of betraying the company and disclosing the back-up plan publicly (Holtfreter & Harrington, 2015).

Off-site storage of data

    The best way to back-up data nowadays is Off-site back-ups. It is basically a method where using an off-site location the information is safely stored in the time of any problem. The Off-site back-ups first encrypt the data then compresses and transmits the data to its security centre. This same data stays safe during any problem the company faces and can be again accessed through another system using the Internet or any other data restore line but only by the host. Thus, making this the safest way of backing up data (Azim et al., 2016).