Protect Your Data Before You Lose It

The mobile office is a beautiful thing — unless it's going mobile without you. Every day, people lose cell phones and laptops. Sometimes it's inadvertent — the phone falls out of your pocket — but sometimes it's outright theft. Either way, you may be losing more than just hardware. You could be losing critical business information, customer and bank account data, password lists and more.

The odds are not good that you'll actually get your lost phone or laptop back. But you can take precautions that limit the damage to your business. We'll look at four different approaches to limiting your losses — and you should think about implementing all of these practices.

Strong passwords. If you carry sensitive data on your phone or laptop, you should create a strong user password to make it difficult for someone to access that data and make off with it. The keyword here is strong. The strongest passwords involve a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and diacritical marks — and you can mix and match these to create a strong password. For example, "!Bus1ness0nMain" is a perfectly strong password that's not hard to remember. With the exclamation point at the beginning, the numerals 1 and 0 in place of the "i" and "o," and the uppercase "B" and "M," I've created a password that's very hard to crack but not that hard to type.

Keep in mind that many smartphones will let you answer a call without entering a password. The password is required for outgoing calls or to access any applications or data you have on your phone. With that said, I encourage you to use a phone password that's short, given the complexities of entering the various characters needed to make a strong password. Even on a smartphone with a full keyboard, such as a Palm or BlackBerry device, entering exclamation points and capital letters is a two-fingered affair.

Remote backups. Make sure to use an online backup service, such as Mozy or IBackup, to make remote backups of the data on your laptop. That way, if someone snatches your laptop you can go online and retrieve your data. Even if you never see the laptop again, you won't have lost the information your business needs.

With more and more critical information residing on smartphones, you'll want to back up those devices, too. Backup software for your smartphone is available from companies like Sprite Software and SPB Software. These applications make it easy to back up your smartphone to your laptop. If you lose your smartphone, you've still got the data that was on it — and if you're backing up your laptop to the Web, you always have copies of the smartphone files as part of the online backup set. Even in the event that both your smartphone and laptop are stolen, you've still got your data.

Remote recovery services. It's true that the odds are against recovering a stolen laptop, but you can improve your chances with a remote recovery service such as Absolute Software's Computrace LoJack for Laptops. With this service, your PC or Mac laptop carries a beacon that interacts with the Absolute Software monitoring center any time your laptop is connected to the Internet. If you report your laptop stolen, the center will listen for your laptop on the Internet. Then it can interact with the beacon to determine your computer's location. Absolute then engages law enforcement to apprehend the thief and secure your laptop.

Data-wiping services. As part of its Computrace LoJack for Laptops premium service, Absolute provides a remote data delete option. Using the remote data delete tools, you can securely wipe some or all of the files from your laptop — starting as soon as the Absolute Software monitoring center picks up your laptop on the Internet. Computrace Mobile from Absolute Software and Sprite Terminator from Sprite Software provide similar capabilities for deleting files from a smartphone that's gone AWOL. This is a very comforting option if you have files that you just do not want in someone else's hands.

So, make sure you're covered. The flexibility to move about is one of the advantages of the mobile office, but along with that flexibility comes a greater degree of vulnerability. Strong passwords, remote backups, remote recovery and data-wiping services can go a long way toward reducing the impact of that vulnerability on your business.

Mark A.R. Mitchell is an avid technology buff and reporter covering small business products and the Consumer Electronics Show. He holds a master’s degree in English literature from Harvard and has worked with leading technology companies and research universities.