It’s a certainty that any business that has to deal with technology also has to deal with data. What is data? Well it’s stuff – 0s and 1s, essentially. “Information” is a pretty good way to put it. And we are living in the Information age – an age where information is the most important commodity and it is traded near-unchecked globally. Whether your business is Wikipedia or just a small ecommerce website that sells Star Trek paraphernalia, information is not only important to you, the business, but it’s also important to your users and people you have to interact with as a business, and damn near everybody else, too.
Not only is data important to businesses, but it is also important to an individual. All of those family photos you’ve got stored on that external hard-drive right there? Well, that’s data. All of your work in word documents and spreadsheets? Well, that’s data too. Whether you’re a business handling sensitive and important data, or just an average Joe trying to make his way in the world data is important. It’s pretty obvious, then, that data is not something you really want trifled with.
And sure, a lot of the time if you have stuff stored on CD/DVD-ROMS or on external hard-drives you’re going to be pretty much okay as long as you don’t drop it or scratch it or some other sort of mishap. But when you’re handling data online, or just using a computer terminal that’s hooked up to the internet, it’s possible you might run into a problem or two. I’m talking about computer viruses of course.
Some people have argued recently that access to the internet is nowadays a base human right. While that arguments seems a little bit weird when you first hear it, it’s not exactly far from the truth. It really is a big and important thing. As we use it more and more, though, and connecting to more and more computers and people via the internet, we’re potentially leaving ourselves open to getting some bad stuff onto our computers.
For example, virtualization and cloud storage has become more and more popularized in recent years, due in part to the ever-increasing connectivity we all have to the internet. Cloud storage is a great little thing that allows you to store your data non-physically on a server somewhere else, that you can then access anywhere via the internet. While it really is a fantastic service and something that you should definitely look into, you shouldn’t think about just in terms of roses and perfume. Keeping your data in such a way could leave it more vulnerable to being affected by a computer virus. It’s nothing really to worry about – it’s just something that you really should be at least aware of, so you can take appropriate action to properly secure your data against viruses before it’s too late. You should always make sure you have some sort of anti-virus protection to protect your data against viruses. And if you’re utilizing all of this great new cloud storage technology then you should definitely make sure you pick some sort of cloud storage package that includes security for your virtual machine, such as DeepSecurity: Virtual Machine Security.
Your data is a commodity – don’t compromise it.