TECHNICAL INNOVATIONS

Technical Innovations

Businesses, large and small, are faced with a myriad of compliance challenges each year. But unfortunately, the financial services industry, which includes investment, insurance and credit, to name a few, seems to have much more regulation for self-explanatory reasons.

There is a clear hierarchy in the credit industry which was evident as we saw the roll-out of POPIA in the debt counselling industry. Even though the debt counsellors are collecting data and passing it on to the credit providers, the credit providers are mostly dictating processes and encryption in their strides to compliance. Rolling this out to the debt counselling industry probably saves debt counsellors a substantial capital outlay.

Suppose we argue that the younger debt counselling industry will soon follow in the footsteps of the investment industry. In that case, it is prudent to start thinking of things like business continuity processes and manuals for several reasons.

Threats and Disasters

The reason for the process is straightforward: protecting data (and devices containing data) against things like fire, floods and theft.

A sudden loss of a key individual within the organisation might block access to bank accounts or impact licensing and registration requirements.

Ransomware and data attacks have recently emerged as one of the most crippling disasters affecting larger organisations. Overnight, industries realised that the inability to access their data could be even more devastating than a data breach.

Accidental and malicious data loss from within the organisation

Importance of full recovery

Business continuity experts widely hold that the plan needs to be simple enough to be readily understood and implemented by someone who reads it for the first time. Access to that data in the shortest amount of time will allow the company to function again after a disaster. The information also needs to be current. With the fast-paced changes and amount of data generated, it is not enough to back up a server monthly, weekly, or even daily.

Changes to data need to be recorded and preserved. It is not sufficient to only have a current mirror image of data, thereby discarding changes. Retention of deleted data is as necessary as the data currently in use. It is also recommended that one finds a robust search and filter functionality within the backup system in the event of partial data loss. If you can imagine, a single folder containing hundreds of unsearchable files (such as certain document scans) would make it impossible to find a particular client’s documents without manually opening each document.

Google Drive and Microsoft Onedrive are more attractive lately than older cloud storage like Dropbox because of the integration into their respective business offerings and affordable cost. But at best, Microsoft Onedrive and Sharepoint environments retain data for 90 days, which is insufficient for financial services.

There are a handful of support agents/distributors in South Africa for a cloud backup system called Dropsuite. However, the software is so user-friendly and intuitive that one virtually needs no support apart from the local invoicing and billing/payment options. In addition, it integrates seamlessly with both Google Workspace and Microsoft Office 365 environments. In the case of Microsoft, it backs up all Onedrives, Emails (both shared mailboxes and designated), Sharepoint sites and even Teams meetings. Data is stored for up to 10 years. The search functionality within the software is so advanced that it is faster to find older data in Dropsuite than in the current Microsoft environment. Changes to data are tracked, and even deleted emails (and entire email boxes) are stored. Users can not delete their email or saved files maliciously, even if they empty the traditional recycle bins.

For a complete brochure on the product, click Dropsuite-Data-Sheet-Email-Archive-04032022 and Dropsuite-Data-Sheet-Email-Backup-04032022

Declaration: The writer does not get any referral fee or commission for this article and uses this software in their own business via a reseller called Velocity.Dropsuite-Data-Sheet-Email-Backup-04032022 Dropsuite-Data-Sheet-Email-Archive-04032022

Eugene Cilliers – NEC Member & CEO of Payplan Solutions