There’s One Area That I Don’t Trust To Luck

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Carbonite. All opinions are 100% mine. I’ve been really blessed in my business. I now get to make a living doing something I really love: helping other entrepreneurs and businesses grow and develop. It’s a great thing, and I love doing it. Of course, I’ve had ups and downs on my way here. We’ve all got our small business stories. There have been ideas that didn’t take off and (probably didn’t deserve to take off). And while most of my downsizing has been voluntary, that wasn’t always the case. But there’s one area where I’ve always been blessed. I’ve worked with some great people. I know not everyone has had that luck but I’ve managed to build teams of people who were talented, hard-working and full of great ideas. We had a lot of fun. But while working with great people can help your business to grow, it brings risks. When I had a big team, I didn’t just have to worry about the salaries I’d have to pay and the office space I had to rent. I also had to worry about data backup. It would only have taken a team member one click on an email link on a company computer to expose all our data. The email list that I’ve built up over the years and which I protect so carefully, could have been swiped by hackers. They could have sent everyone spam which would have annoyed thousands of people. Or they could have held the list to ransom, or even deleted it entirely. It would have been a disaster. Of course, we had anti-virus software and a firewall to protect our borders but a mistake inside the company was always something that concerned me. People have given me their email addresses on trust. I have a duty to look after them… and people make mistakes. We all do it. Now that I’ve mostly slimmed back down to a company of one, I still worry about that. I’m not a giant corporation with piles of user data to protect. I’m not Facebook or Google. But I do have information that’s valuable, and I’ve made enough mistakes to know that it doesn’t take much to expose and experience a data loss that can’t be replaced. The fact is that data protection is essential. And if you’re not using a back-up service, you should be. I use Carbonite. It’s got temperature-controlled data centers and its staff have to use biometric scanners to get to work. (It sounds like the sort of thing that only Tom Cruise could break into.) But what really matters to me is that I can just set and forget it. I know if I have to upload everything manually or struggle to download everything again, I’m going to get in trouble. With Carbonite, everything happens automatically. I know that my email lists and other data are tightly secured, and that if I happen to hit a link in an email promising to reveal some shocking new discovery I can restore everything quickly. We all have a thousand reasons to feel blessed in our lives. The fact that I’ve never had a data breach is one of them… but I’m not relying on that luck lasting and neither should you. Be sure to protect your data. 

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