By Adam Steele

When a company storing my business’s data lost its servers in a natural disaster, I lost years worth of data for a project I was hoping to launch soon. It forced me to confront the fact that I hadn’t been paying enough attention to the risk of data loss in my business, and I don’t think I’m alone.

Nearly all businesses rely on data storage now, whether through internal solutions or off-site vendors. Losing data that you can’t recover could cause a number of repercussions, from furious customers, to tax disputes, and even legal judgments. Because of these risks, every business owner needs a strong data protection plan and policies and standards in place.

I recently developed some standards for my own company with the help of some very talented people on my team. You can use them to develop your own data protection strategy, and with just a little bit of work, not suffer the same losses I did.

Make Redundancy Mandatory

You know that you need to have backups of all your files, but is that something you do in practice? Do your employees know for certain what information should be backed up? When and how often are backups created? Where are they stored? You and your employees alike should be able to answer these questions confidently.

Check out the rest of the article at forbes.com