Data Lifecycle Management™
by Lorine Parks
“How many of you own your own business?” our speaker asked. Many hands were raised.
Say your small business is a travel agency, doing $5 million dollars worth of business each year. You store thousands of client files with names, past trips, credit card numbers, seat preferences, even travelling partners. To service a client, you need constant access to this data. How do you feel about outsiders stealing and selling all your hard-won information, for purposes way beyond their travel needs?
How about surviving downtime? Because the airlines regulate your travel business heavily, it is the carriers who store your records, on their computers. In the case of the Apollo computer you are relying on United’s system, and the brain is in Denver, where they have snowstorms. If you have American’s Sabre, the brain is in Dallas where floods can knock out the system.
How to back up your records, in case of Denver being down? In case of a power outage in Dallas? What if your files are hacked, or malware causes your computer to be down all day? Downtime costs money. Even worse than temporarily losing money, studies show that 78% of all small businesses who have to shut down because of a calamity, be it a flood or fire or theft, never re-open for operation.
Who is your “quarterback,” the one who knows what the records contain. Is it your lead agent? Your bookkeeper? Yourself? When disaster strikes, you have to have a “Plan B” and be ready to go into that mode. What is your recovery plan?, asks Doug Williams. How long will it take it get in to action? Is there a clear chain of succession, for responsibilities?
To hackers, your vendors’ addresses are open knowledge; so are your contractors. You have a payroll with Federal deductions, liable to state and federal taxes. Your travel agency has override agreements with several domestic and foreign airlines, and with tour and cruise companies. You do not want your competitors to know you have these advantages. But they can
find out.
Even more insidious, data about your personal life and life style are captured all the time, whenever you go on Facebook and “like” something, or on Twitter, linkedIn, Instagram, pinterest, or any social media. If you buy things on the Internet, your choices are analyzed, by someone else and without your permission. When you take a silly frivolous “quiz” about who you might be, reincarnated, or what dog or flower you are, your answers are recorded.
We live in a time when our very technology has made us vulnerable. Each time we Google a subject, our behavior betrays us and our privacy is a myth.
Douglas Williams and his company, Data Lifecycle Management,™ to the rescue. “It’s like the wild, wild West out there,” he says, with no law west of the Pecos to protect the individual. But his system provides comprehensive solutions to plan, store, retrieve and destruct data for businesses of every size. Protection of your business is the name of the game.
Williams Data Management, a full service Data Lifecycle Management firm, provides professional records management, data protection, imaging and digitization, cloud storage and certified data destruction services to all sectors and sizes of businesses throughout Southern California.
“Every administrator, manager, and C-Suite executive” Doug says, knows that “data is the most critical asset in today’s business landscape.” Across industries as varied as education, entertainment, finance, health care, human resources and law, all businesses in Southern California need fast, convenient, and cost-effective ways to protect, manage, and securely dispose of critical information.
Doug’s company is committed to “technology innovation through full-service solutions,” including physical and digital storage, certified document and hard drive shredding, product destruction, and more. Last year saw the company’s acquisition of Shred Masters, Inc., an established document destruction firm based in Ontario. A mobile hard-drive specialist can arrive on-site to assure complete destruction every time.
- Hard drives are destroyed pursuant to NAID ‘AAA’ Certification guidelines
- All metals are recovered and recycled
- In all cases, serial numbers are recorded for an audit trail
- They destroy obsolete business records and files, confidential medical charts, hard drives, LTO/DLT and other back-up tapes, CDs, DVDs, and Diskettes, too!
“Train, have a disaster plan, ensure continuity,” says Doug. Consult him on how to plan, store data, be able to retrieve it no matter what, and then destroy it effectively, if you don’t want to be kept up at night worrying about these problems that data can bring.