Back Up and Protect Your Website
For many website administrators, there is no worse nightmare than the thought of your entire website crashing or being destroyed by hackers. Such disasters may seem unlikely in your organization, but it is actually quite common that a business has to completely restore a lost website. In fact, DatalossDB reports that since 2006 the number of incidents in which personally identifiable information is lost, exposed or stolen has more than doubled. With that in mind, here are few ways to back up and protect your site from data loss or malicious hackers.
Keep It up to Date
One of the easiest things to do to help protect your website is to update all your plugins. Make sure that any scripts your page runs are updated regularly, and ensure that your website’s core installation is up to date. Since many of the tools used in website creation are open source, hackers have free access to the code — all they need is time to pour over the scripts to find a security loophole to exploit. Luckily, developers are constantly looking for these loopholes as well, and every update makes your plugins more secure.
Don’t forget to install security plugins such as SiteLock, which monitors your website for suspicious activity and reports this activity to you. It also searches for vulnerabilities in your plugins and software. Having the right security plugin and keeping it up to date can build a powerful shield against malicious attempts to crack your site.
Back it up
Backing up your website is one of the fundamental tasks you must perform if you want assurance that your site will be salvageable if things go terribly wrong. Data loss can happen in a variety of ways, but the most common are often the most frustrating.
Cloudwards reports that the most common cause of data loss is a hardware or system malfunction, which cause 44 percent of all data loss; the second most common cause at 32 percent is human error. This means your data isn’t safe even if you have the best IT guys or hardware, and data backups are the only way to be sure you have something to fall back on.
Luckily, services like Mozy provide affordable, regular and automated backup services for business and enterprise-level operations. Automated backup removes human error by regularly backing up your files on a schedule you choose, while still providing you the option to back up your data when it has undergone a change. Don’t gamble when it comes to backups and get a reliable data backup provider you trust.
Think in Duplicate
All the backups in the world won’t do any good if they reside on servers at your building that is vulnerable to storm flooding. Keeping data backups is a good first step, but figuring out where to keep them and how many to keep is the next step.
Backups should be stored offsite, which makes cloud computing options a great solution for data backups, but a single copy is never enough. Redundancy is security when it comes to data. Make a second backup of your crucial data and keep it somewhere offsite, just in case.
