Trapped. Is that how you feel about the security of your digital data? Then it’s probably time you gave encryption a serious thought. Of cou rse there are firewalls, proxies, anti-virus software, etc to guard your data, and you can always dump all the ultra secret data onto CDs and lock them up in your safe. 
But no matter what you do, no matter how many doors you close, there are always those backdoor entries that evade you and the fear still remains. Especially now when you know that there are plenty of readymade tools for hackers: sniffers, spoofing techniques and plenty of others, all freely available on the Internet. Armed with these, even an amateur can find it an easy matter to break into your system and grab your data.
What does one do in situations like this? Well, one good option is encryption. Most of us have some kind of sensitive data on our system that we’d rather no one else had access to. It cou Id be anything from vital business documents, research data, political secrets, financial details or something as trivial as a romantic tete-ii-tete you’d rather not have anyone else see. It’s always easier to simply encrypt such data and rest assured that unless decoded, it’s complete gibberish to the prowler.
This post is a continuation of our series on online backups. If you have not read our previous post click here.
Another plus with online backups is that they are centralized and thus make it easier to track that ad-hoc backups on separate work stations- it makes life much simpler for administrators. Finally with online backups you can be rest assured that your data is comparatively safer from physical disasters.
On the downside the biggest drawback with online backups is the high bandwidth requirement. It becomes mandatory to have a good bandwidth for backups and restores, especially for backing up large media files. With 64kbps bandwidth you could end up waiting for an eternity for a complete initial backup. Given the current bandwidth scenario in some countries this can be an issue to content with.
Initially when somebody mentioned the idea of online backups to me the idea struck to me as uber-foolish, today with hard disks zip drives and mobile laptops, who in the hell really needs more storage space. Besides, we usually back up vital data- only a fool would risk putting all his data online for hackers to have a field day.
But after a little deliberation I realized that there is something about backups, it’s not about free online storage at all- it’s about control, convenience and the collaboration of data.
Such backups make most sense for the individuals and small and medium - size companies with high speed internet connections; online backups could also be ideal solution to problems like remote access, offsite storage, frequent backup requirements and real time interconnections across locations, employees can share spreadsheets, databases, etc online. And of course they save a lot of theme take for disaster recovery. Anyone who has to deal with a nasty virus or a crashed drive would know what I mean.
We would continue on the topic in our next post…
Internet has been revolutionizing our life for years. It has nearly made all the things accessible from a remote location. This while has its benefits; it can also be an issue similar to one we are facing now.
All the major Olympic events are being streamed live by various networks. Normally it wouldn’t be a worry to anybody but with the massive internet usage growth and the restriction imposed by Chinese Government over number of streaming servers has definitely made it a problem, one which we need to at the very least think about.
If we only count the internet users from China and US, the number is about 430 million. Even if we assume that only 50% of the people of these two countries use the internet to watch the Olympics, we can easily figure out what are we up against. But the picture is going to be larger than this; entire world is watching the Olympics and will be streaming the videos.
The question that is on our hands is will the internet be able to pass the Olympic test. I expect it to be answered in a few days time.
