Well it seems that Google is working on restoring the emails that it lost over the weekend.
My advice would be to keep a local copy of all emails by using an imapi setup, and then backing this data up with a business class online backup service, like ours!

With the constant fall of prices of external hard drives, more and more companies are using these inexpensive units as their preferred method of backing up their business data.  To go with these units you will need some form of backup software, and if you wish to backup multiple computers, either several licences, or software that can backup your PC’s over your network.

Good business disaster planning should include the eventuality of not being able to gain access to your business, and this is an issue for this method of backup.  Also should the hard drive fail, you have lost all of your backups, and all hard drives fail, mobile units often sooner because they are treated with less respect.

Another major problem with this method of backup is that rarely is the data encrypted or access protected, like it would be when stored on the native PC, with even basic user verification/password.  This breaks the rules of the data protection act, and recently the authority’s have been coming down much harder on businesses that are breaking the rules.

However, are you happy to trust all of your business data to a unit costing say £60?  What would be the cost of replacing the data?

GBData online backup or Remote Backup software will take al of these issues away.  By installing the software on all of the PC’s requiring backup, or simply installing it on one PC and mapping the other computers through the network, all of your cmputers will be protected.

Our famous five minute install will leave you covered, and our 80G/30 day trial lets your try the service free from worries or commitments.

When laptops were first available, they were treated with great care and attention. To be given a laptop by your company marked you out as someone special.

Today, the laptop is commonplace. They are no longer the possession of high powered business executives or IT developers. Everyone from geeks to the occasional home user is moving away from desktop computers to the laptop.

There are many reasons for this. Price, processor power, increased battery life, footprint on the desk and the move to an increasingly mobile lifestyle, are just some of them. The laptop has now become so common that it’s “just another device” to many people. As a result, people have become careless. This is evidenced in the fact that almost every week there is another story of a lost or stolen laptop making the headlines. Often these stories only appear because the person or their job is considered “high profile”. Military chiefs, intelligence officers and even developers with personal credit card information have all been “named and shamed” yet the procession of losses goes on.

Some of the cases are down to acts of simple theft. Putting a bag containing a laptop on the ground while buying a railway ticket or leaving the laptop in the boot of a car is two of the common excuses. Having it stolen while in a pub or restaurant, leaving it on a train, plane, in a taxi are also very high up there on the agenda. It seems that the laptop has succeeded the umbrella in terms of the object of property people misplace the most.

So how bad is it? Recent figures from UK police forces show that over 34,000 laptops are reported stolen each year. This is almost 100 per day and only deals with those that are actually reported to the police.

What does it cost? That’s a question with no definitive answer. You can insure a laptop for around 7.5% of its value so a £1000 laptop would cost you just £75. Most insurers will look at the model and need a copy of any invoice. If you later add software to the laptop you will need to provide additional information to your insurer and, depending on the cost of the software pay an additional premium.

What about my data? Good question. What’s your data worth to you? When did you last back it up? Basic insurance policies as described above WILL NOT include restitution of data. These are generally part of a separate insurance policy for your business. A quick call to your insurance broker will establish what these premiums are but generally expect to pay around £100 for data restitution costs of up to £5000. This is only for restoring your data eg the cost of re-keying data or recovering a corrupted hard disk. It does not compensate you for unique data that you might have lost such as software under development or notes about customers. Many insurance companies will simply point out that you should have backed that data up.

A recurring theme in the recent stories, such as the US-based MCI employee whose laptop contained the personal details of 16,500 employees, is that identity theft is the key goal of laptop thieves. This is more likely to be a secondary gain to the thief rather than a major target and no police force or insurance agent would offer any figures to cover professional targeting of laptops for this purpose.

The same can be said of the number of senior executives whose laptops get stolen. Generally, they are seen as highly attractive items as they are top of the range technology. While there is an increasing market in Intellectual Property, there are no statistics kept as to whether such information is actually traded and for what sort of money. It is more likely that such information will be stolen by hackers.

Protecting against laptop and data theft would appear to be relatively easy but, in a business sense, is rarely so. Some basic steps for employees to follow in order to protect laptops include:

1. Leave the laptop unattended in a public place.
2. Leave a laptop on a desktop at lunch, while in a meeting or overnight.
3. put a laptop in hold baggage.
4. In a restaurant or bar, always ensure that the bag containing the laptop cannot be snatched. Put the shoulder strap under your chair leg.
5. You need to visit the bathroom, take your bag with you unless you are with a trusted colleague who you have asked to “mind” your laptop.
6. Bags might look like the ideal place to keep you laptop but they stand out a mile. Try and keep the laptop in a less obvious bag such as a briefcase.
7. In a hotel, store the laptop in the room safe, even when just going for breakfast, dinner or to use the gym. If the room doesn’t have a safe, take it to the front desk and have the hotel store it for you.
8. Leave the laptop or the bag containing the laptop on show in the car, even if you are in the car with it. Many a bag has been snatched through a car window while stopped in traffic.
9. You need to leave the laptop in the car, conceal it in the boot.
10. Leave it in the boot for long periods and never leave it overnight.

These might all seem like commonsense items but for every single entry in this list you will find people who have lost their computers by not taking precautions.

What about data? Protection of corporate data is critical today. You could argue that employees should not have sensitive information on their laptop when out of the office. While this would be nice, the reality is that the laptop is a working environment. This means that the person carrying the laptop needs that data in order to do some form of work.

So what can you do?

1. Strong but memorable passwords. – Too many people write down passwords because the password policy is unworkable. You could dispense with conventional passwords and use Pointsec PicturePIN which consists of a series of pictures so that the user simply points out the pictures corresponding to “his” story. Not only is this system just as secure as traditional passwords, but it’s easier to remember with no chance that you’ll be tempted to write your “password” down.
2. The data on the disk. – This will ensure that even if the disk can be accessed, the data is secure. Make sure the encryption is seamless and quick, and managed centrally, so that the user cannot circumvent it.
3. Users about the risks of carrying too much data and do regular audits to ensure that non essential data is deleted. – It’s too easy to just “leave” data on the computer after it is no longer needed. An audit policy design as part of a risk assessment process will reduce the impact of data loss and ensure you know exactly “what” has been lost.
4. A backup mechanism that makes it easy for users to take copies of data daily while traveling. – GBData online backup software can be installed, and runs automatically, all that is needed is an internet connection, common place nowadays.
5. A Laptop Protection Policy. – This is a document that outlines the responsibility of the user and how they should treat their laptop and data. It is no less important than any other corporate email or data policy and, as such, should be part of the employees contract of employment.

What you can do, however, is make it harder for thieves to get hold of devices through the simple security steps outlined above. By encrypting data and good use of passwords, you can also ensure that the only value to the thief is from the sale of the laptop and not your data.

The ultimate protection is the installation of GBData backup software, so that should the worst happen, you can be confident htat all your data is safe.

According to a recent Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC)-sponsored survey, SMB customers are “getting more serious about their information protection” and therefore, channel partners need to be ready for the “huge opportunities” that will present themselves in this space, said one Symantec executive.

Monica Girolami, a senior product marketing manager at Symantec, said one of the key findings from the 2010 Information Protection Survey was that “SMBs are really getting serious now about their information protection. This is exciting for us because this shows that the awareness that we’ve in addition to other vendors and partners, have been trying to drive, is finally starting to pay off. But we still have a ways to go.”

When asked to rank their top five business risks, survey participants rated data loss and cyber-attacks as their top one and two respective risks, followed by traditional criminal activity, natural disasters and terrorism.

In addition, Girolami said survey respondents noted that their top IT improvement areas were solutions involving backup and recovery, disaster recovery and security. Likely due in large part to the consumerization of IT and more workers now bringing their own devices into the workplace, security and policies around them are becoming more important, Girolami said.

“People are sharing information more freely now, whether that’s through things like laptops or PDAs,” Girolami explained. “It becomes more of a question of ‘Where does the critical information reside and what can be done to protect it?’ While all organizations face these same types of challenges, SMBs don’t have the dollars to put towards these (efforts), or the necessary education in the areas they’re challenged in.”

While 31 per cent of survey participants said they back up their data on a daily basis, 47 per cent said they don’t. When asked why they don’t back up their data, 39 per cent of businesses said it “never occurred to (them) to do so.”

For the channel, this becomes an opportunity to get out and talk to both new and existing customers, Girolami said. Partners should help their customers better understand the importance of having Internet security guidelines and policies and make sure that customers are aware of the latest security risks and threats. Partners can also help customers with disaster recovery plans and testing them to make sure everything’s in working order.

“Partners should ask their customers questions like, ‘What are you doing today to ensure you can recover your systems in the event of a disaster?’” Girolami advises. “Partners can then start looking at disaster recovery plans with their customers to provide them with more of a value-add.”

On the technology side, customers should implement a data loss prevention (DLP) solution, in addition to having backup and recovery protection to better secure critical business information from cyber-attack, human error or natural disasters, she added.

Channel partners can offer their customers Symantec’s Protection Suite Advanced Business Edition, which Girolami said is an all-in-one, comprehensive security solution suite which includes capabilities such as endpoint security, messaging security and backup and recovery protection.

“Partners can now have an overall discussion around information protection and bring a comprehensive solution to the table instead of just talking about point products,” Girolami said.

You can read the full article here: