The protection of digital assets is becoming more important as the amount of data continues its exponential growth. Safe data storage helps organizations keep away from cyber-attacks and ransomware attacks that could compromise their valuable information. This article outlines the best method to protect data, regardless of whether it’s stored on hard drives, USBs or online via cloud storage solutions.

Backups are a vital part of any secure data storage system. Creating a secondary copy of any file ensures that in the event of its loss due to hardware failure or theft, or an accident then there is another copy of the file. This is not enough protection against all threats.

Storage administrators should follow some key guidelines to ensure backups are secure.

Encryption – all sensitive data at rest and moving, should be secured. This ensures that no one will have access to the data unless they possess the encryption keys, which must be kept in a separate storage area and updated regularly.

Anomaly detection — a strong security system for your network must be in place to recognize and take action on any unusual behavior that could suggest that an attack could be underway. This is usually a good way to catch attackers who are in the act and prevent them from stealing information from storage systems.

Immutable storage — it’s best to have multiple copies of the same file and the main copy should be unchangeable. This is similar to a time capsule that saves your data exactly as it was at site web the moment of saving.