By Paige Lambert

When business owners prepare for the worst, many focus on protecting their physical assets from disasters. However, having a game plan to protect documents and data can be just as important.

Clay Huckaby, Buda fire chief, said he was glad his department considered that before the flood last October.

The station was covered in three feet of water and suffered $150,000 in damages, Huckaby said. As a result of having flood insurance, the department was only out $75,000. Of that, only $10,000 had to go to document recovery.

“We had some piles of paper on the floor, and the contents of drawers were damaged, but most of our accounting documents are stored offsite,” Huckaby said. “We also have our computer systems stationed at multiple locations.”

Since then, offices have been moved to higher ground with concrete floors instead of carpet. Huckaby said the employees worked in cubicles for a few months, but continued business as usual since the systems and data were secure.

Natural disasters are definitely a threat for all kinds of businesses and owners, depending on location. For a business, cyber theft can be just as disastrous wherever it may be.

This is a particular interest for retail and service companies, Eddie Hebert, of Hays Insurance Group, said. They not only have to protect their information, but those of their customers as well.

Customer information is usually stolen when businesses don’t invest in secure networks or credit card reader companies, Hebert said. It usually happens at smaller fuel stations, or even large companies like Target last year.

“It could affect their good faith and be detrimental,” Hebert said. “If I owned a restaurant, I would hate for it to come from my business.”

To protect business data, Hebert said he sees businesses employ hard disk encryptions on their main servers. If someone robbed the business, the computer’s personal information couldn’t be accessed.

“People used to back up information on tapes and CDs, and in multiple places, but what if that place was affected too,” Hebert said. “The information is protected, but it’s still gone.”

As technology use has increased, information security has also taken this online route.

“Most of our stuff is electronic,” Huckaby said. “We’re required to keep documents for seven years, so we wanted to make room and reduce our carbon footprint.”

Multiple Cloud companies have sprung up and become public within the past two years and businesses are using them to better manage their mounds of documents.

Hebert said this type of storage and security has also increased because of the rise in home-based and mobile businesses. 

“We’re in a world where people are moving around and operating from multiple locations,” Hebert said. “It’s so inexpensive now to upload to the data to the cloud and have a secure backup.”

For example, Google stores 200 GB of information for around $10 a month. Most other cloud storage companies cost the same, depending on the amount of space that’s needed.

Some have taken extra precautions and combined off-site and online security.

“We realized too many people trust us with their personal information to have it housed in one physical place,” Hebert said.

His company switched to an online data company 10 years ago. The management system gives the employees 24/7 access, and houses the information in six to seven server locations.

“The chances that all places are hit at once is very slim,” Hebert said. “If one location is affected, we can still operate business as usual.”