TOP FIVE LIST FOR BUSINESSES

Protect your company data over the holidays and prepare for 2009

Business owners looking to leave town over the holidays can go with peace of mind by following these five steps to protect their company data. These steps are also great tools to utilize in getting your business organized for the New Year. DataPreserve, an Arizona-based provider of automatic data backup and storage solutions for small to medium sized businesses, offers these tips for helping businesses prepare for the worst and organize for a successful 2009.

1) Clean out last year’s files. Throw out or store what you don’t need anymore and clean out old emails. Clutter can cause your system to slowdown and even crash.

2) Update any anti-virus software, spy ware and firewall protections on all of your computers. That last thing you want to deal with is a virus infecting your hard drive while you’re away.

3) Gather all of your 2008 financials in order to avoid conflicts and extra work at tax time.

4) Create a list of goals for 2009 and develop a plan on how you will achieve them. New software on the market can help with this, research your options.

5) Acquire an online data back up service, like DataPreserve, to ensure all of your data stays safe offsite in the event of a virus, technology breakdown, theft or natural disaster.

With many business owners and their employees taking time off for the holidays, it is imperative that they take measures to protect their company while they are gone. We know all to well what can happen when a company experiences a disaster, natural or otherwise, and cannot retrieve their work. In fact, studies show that 19 out of 20 small businesses that lose their data for more than 10 days go out of business. Taking a few preventive steps can reduce personal stress and business problems.