Real Time Protection: Not Just Against Viruses

In a field very unrelated to computing, farm crops are constantly protected against viruses. They are regularly checked for signs of viruses and infection, as failure to do so is risking a crop that doesn’t repay the considerable investment in growing, maintenance, and harvesting. In some areas, crop theft is also a problem and money must be spent on security as well.

In the same way, computer data is constantly, in real time, protected against harmful viruses, trojans and malware such as worms. The investment in data is much of the time considerably higher than the investment in crops on a farm–sometimes even being worth billions of dollars–as well as the time to “grow” it, which can be in years. Also like crops, data must be vigilantly guarded against theft, sought by criminals seeking to raid bank accounts, make illicit credit card charges or even commit corporate espionage.

But where the similarities part is in the subject of accidental deletions. A farmer, unless amazingly inept, is not going to be driving his tractor through a field and accidentally delete a corn stalk or apple tree. Computer files, however, are quite another matter. Since data only has a semi-physical existence–in stored bits on magnetic media–it is quite open to a user erroneously clicking on “delete” instead of “save” or accidentally hitting a delete key when the file is highlighted.

When that happens (as it all too frequently does) the result is usually a frantic call to the help desk. The harried help desk person will probably refer the user to the Windows Recycle Bin–which, in an enterprise environment, will most likely do no good whatsoever; files are saved across a network on a server, and the Windows Recycle Bin only allows recovery of files from a local drive. The only option will be a time consuming search through backup for the version of the file that existed when the last backup was performed. Once hours are spent restoring the file, it could require substantial work bringing that file back to the condition it was in when deleted. Of course, if the file was created since the last backup, it will have to be re-created from scratch.

The answer in such a case is a software solution that allows real time protection–and real time recovery–of accidentally deleted files. Such a solution replaces the Windows Recycle Bin with one of its own, making recovery a matter of a couple mouse clicks taking only seconds. This same solution also allows for the retrieval of earlier versions of other file types which normally cannot be recovered in any circumstances, such as earlier, over-written versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.

In addition to the real-time protection provided by data security products, this relatively small investment in real time protection and real time recovery will save a company tremendously in lost time and money.