Information Insurance

As businesses we insure many things to reduce our risk. A partial list of these insurances might look like this - Business liability, workers compensation, health, fire & theft, errors & omissions, equipment. Many of these policies are not optional but are required by some entity. The government requires some of this insurance as well as more if we have employees, the bank mandates you insure to protect their investment. All too often business owners forget to consider their own best interests when considering insurance. At this point have you considered exactly why you have all this insurance besides - it's required. We insure to protect our assets from a variety of events. Disasters both natural and man-made can come to our assets. What are our assets and why are they important? Without prioritizing they might be, employees, real property, inventory, equipment, money, goodwill, and intellectual property.

Most insurance you purchase is reactive, in that the insurance company will pay to restore your situation back to the condition you were in prior to the insured event. Then we have to get into what is an insured event (that discussion another time). Let-s consider something like wellness insurance for a moment. Would taking steps to prevent illness or minimize the severity have value? Do you get a flu shot or go to the dentist every six months? This is preventative and proactive. We can't prevent all events such as a cavity but we can minimize the impact when it happens. This also applies to the information that all businesses collect on a daily basis. We generate sales and contacts, which translate into inventory, financial, and customer information. Who is mandating that you insure this information? Will your business continue to operate without access to these databases?

Some business insurance will cover the expenses to recreate these databases. These expenses could include temporary help to enter data from the source documents if they still exist, but how long will that take and what is the loss during this time frame? The best insurance for this type of loss is a secure off-site copy of your business information. This will allow for rapid restoration of the exact data you had before that disaster (fire, hard drive failure, flood). There are many ways to generate this off-site backup. The method you chose is your choice, but it is a type of insurance that you as the business owner should mandate. Some types of property can be replaced by throwing money at the problem and some can't - business data is very, very hard to recover without a backup.

What options are available? Daily backups using a tape, cd-rom, or zip drive taken home or to a bank safe deposit box work well. This method requires a person to do one or more tasks to complete the protection, which has always been the Achilles heel in the program. Net Trek Inc provides a completely automated off-site storage service.