Recovering From A Major Data Leak

One morning you wake up to find that your business is not in the same state that you left it. Something terrible has occurred in which you have lost immense amounts of data. This is data of all kinds such as for your current, previous and future projects. Data of all your employees such as their work history, their resumes, their plans such as healthcare and bonuses. Most importantly, your customers have been breached and their data has been lost. You don’t know how it happened or why but you know that you only have a small window to claw all this back before it crucially hurts your business. Some businesses don’t even recover from such an event but if you follow certain procedures you can.

Establish why

Firstly you have to figure out why the leak happened because even if you correct it, it might happen again. The two most common reasons are carelessness at a workstation and deliberate sabotage from an employee. The former is probably more common but don’t discount that an employee might have leaked the data to a cyber criminal organization or simply just out into the world. Leaks are much more devastating because essentially they cannot be prepared for in the absolute sense that an attack from cyber criminals can. Your employees have access to data therefore once they are logged in there is an element of trust that can be broken and not stopped.

Inform in good time

Firstly don’t panic, the more you panic the more shortcuts you’re likely to take as you don’t want this data leak to be known to the public just yet. It’s only right that you give yourself some time and work on recovering the data before you go public. More than likely you have a backup of all the data somewhere, whether it be on physical hard drives or potentially on your backup servers. If you update your data daily or weekly, this will be your saving grace as you can copy and paste this into your system. If you do have all of your data on a cloud system then you should inform the company you have hired of the situation immediately so they can begin a large transfer of the data to your in-house system.

Ask for help

There’s no shame in admitting that right about now you need some help. It’s far better to look with egg on your face than to smear egg on your customers’ faces. Contact a company like https://www.xirtix.com/ that actually deals with data backup and data protection. They will have methods you can employe immediately and services that will also protect your data in future. They will not only backup your data but they replicate it off site therefore there are multiple walls of protection.

Recovering from a major data disaster can be done quickly but only if you know what to do. Use the backup data you had in storage and this will keep your business functioning in the meantime. Contact a data recovery company as soon as you can so they can get to work figuring out where the leak happened and how to plug it.