Infographic: How Secure Is Our Data?

CloudBerry Lab, a vendor of cloud backup and storage solutions has conducted
a survey at AWS re:Invent conference with a results indicating that a large percent of IT professionals are victims of data loss caused by malware, hardware failure or human error.

In the light of this, we\’ve created the infographic below to visualize the survey results:

As a part of our effort to raise awareness towards data security, we\’ve collected some comments from our interns who openly expressed their opinions regarding the issue:

Edward

Based on above article, majority of IT pros admitted that they have lost data due to hardware failure and data corruption caused by malware or accidental files deletion. The data size could be extremely large that might need longer time until data are fully backup, same goes to data recovery. One of the most critical factors is hardware failure. Hardware failure is unpredictable that out of the blue situation might occur. Based on the article, 5% respondents are still using tape or removable devices for backup. Data size for removable device is small around 0GB to 256GB. It can be used only to backup small size data. A drop on floor or heavy collision for removable device could cause data lost unless you are very careful. Backup on removable device still consists risk of data lost. Thus, it is not recommended for sensitive data or data of a large size. On the other hand, if you have any personal data you wished to delete, you can simply search online with keywords like how to remove my information.

Another contributing factor of data loss is human forgetfulness. Based on the article, half of respondents have admitted that they failed to backup their personal data because they “simply forget to do so”. With such circumstance, a reminder can be used to remind individuals to backup their data on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. This will hopefully develop into a habit that will prevent unnecessary data loss in the future. And you can also contact a consultant who works with GDPR as that ensures you have no problems, which is obviously very wise.

Moreover, unsecured backup is the a factor common to everyone. Most of us do not cares whether a backup is secured or not. But from IT perspective, securing data is a practise highly emphasised on. Unsecured data could be leaked around the world. Some data are profitable if it is sensitive data. Here is one of the recent news about Sony data leak that I have read. Data should be encrypted and it should be unreadable by human.

As conclusion, data stored in removable devices face the risk of loss. The issue of forgetting to backup or securing data can be solved using Cloud. Some Cloud services do provide awesome quality like CloudBerry, Dropbox and OneDrive (SkyDrive). Data are hosted on Cloud are encrypted and schedule backup can be made automatically. Even accidentally deleted files can be restored within 30 days. With Cloud backup, the risk of losing your data is reduced to zero, thanks to the fact that data hosted on Cloud are well maintained. Hardware failure on Cloud would not affect your data. In my opinion, Cloud would be the future technology for data storage. Some Cloud service does provide free service that data storage up can be up to 1TB. The more storage you need, the more you need to pay.

Srinivasan

A survey was conducted by CloudBerry Lab, a vendor of backup and management services to check the backup habits of people. The findings were unexpected; with them showing that although 9 out of 10 IT Pros have lost data, they either wait up to a month or more to backup; mainly because they forget to do so. This aspect could be true, as many times, backup is seen as a manual task and one that is unnecessary because nobody foresees drive failure. It is the assumption of most people that nothing could possibly go wrong. There were other findings, such as the decrease in the usage of tapes to backup data; unsecured backups are fairly common; and finally, cloud is the future of data storage.

These are findings that I would partially disagree with. Although tape backups are used significantly less by individuals given the availability of external hard disks, they are still the choice of backup by large corporations with huge databases such as banks. Most of them tend to use tape as it is cheap and reliable. However, since majority of the user have little utility for such large storage, external drives are more popular due to their portability.

Second, unsecured backups are common because secured backups are again considered tedious. Most people don’t see the need to make secure backups of their data since most of them are not sensitive in nature. Moreover people live under the illusion that no one needs their data since they are not very important in the scheme of things.

Third, I would disagree with the point that cloud is the future of data storage. Cloud storage may be fine for non-essential data; and smaller files such as photos or documents. However it is not possible to expect that a person will have Internet access everywhere he/she goes. There lies the biggest disadvantage of cloud storage. The speed of access and the accessibility itself is related to the Internet which is not always guaranteed. Moreover, larger files would require longer time to read and write.

The other problem associated with cloud storage is the point that the data is left to the mercy of the company providing the services. While they have various privacy agreements in place, it doesn\’t prevent unscrupulous attackers from hacking the servers and illegally accessing the data. This is, however, a theoretical problem. How far this holds true in practise is still unknown.

Teck Kan

After reading this article, in my opinion the lost of data  is mostly due to human mistakes such as accidentally deleting a file, forgetting to backup data, replacing the wrong file and others. Backing up data is a good practice, it can help in recovering the data we lost or minimize the loss of data. Personally, I don’t backup my whole computer hard drive or frequently update my backup file. I just copy the folder that contains important document into an external hard drive or a pen drive (not recommended since I lose my pen drive most of the time) and update after every 5-6 months.

Lastly, I don’t think that storing data in cloud storage is a solution to prevent loss of data. This is because we do not know that the data we store in cloud storage is secure, even if the cloud storage provider say that their security is flawless, who can guarantee that our data won’t leak out or be used without our consent or for illegal purposes. But I don’t deny that we can store some non-sensitive data in cloud storage such as music, movies, and documents that are not related to personal information.

Ziau

Based on the article I want to say that I really like to store files in cloud because if my computer hard disk  crashes, I can get back my files or data from the an online database. I have been using Dropbox(Dropbox.com), Google drive and SoundCloud, that are similar to CloudBerry, for 2 years. I stored some files in Dropbox like videos, images, audio and some important files. So I don’t need to take my laptop or pendrive along with me wherever I go because I can easily manage the files through the online database. I could not store all of my files from my pc because its really time consuming. The only problem of storing files in Cloud is time. It takes too much time to be stored if I want to store a video or a large file.

I used to store files in CD but it did not last for a long, many of my files were corrupted. After that I have been using external/portable hard disk until now to store my files. Its easier to store files to portable hard disk than cloud because it does not take too much time.

I prefer cloud database because its easy to share the stored files. If we want to share a file with some one we can easily send the link(URL) of the file instead of transferring file from our pc hard disk to their pendrive. The link is known as Dropbox link (in Dropbox database).

I don’t  rely in cloud because if it has problem with database then I will lose all my important files that were stored in the database though it has strong security. So I take the cloud as an optional backup of my files.

I did not know CloudBarry before. I  signed up there and got to see that the user interface is not friendly, though it has well secured database. So still I prefer Dropbox.com to store files and soundcloud.com to store music.