As agents we receive and store electronic files containing data that is important to our business and some information that must be kept private. I live on an island that has been hit by hurricanes and know that any storage here could be compromised in the event of a serious disaster. That's true wherever you are too, even if you aren't located where there is significant risk of tornadoes or earthquakes. Disasters happen and we should all have protection in place for whatever data is critical to our business.
For me that means redundancy in my back ups. I have both cloud and hard back up systems. But what about keeping them secure from hackers or theft? Anything can be hacked these days it seems but I want to make it as hard as possible for my data to be hacked. And anything can be stolen.
I decided to keep my hard data storage fully encrypted with a very long password required to access it. If the drives are even stolen it will take skill and time to hack them. But I must keep some full back up off island, preferably far way. So my best solution is cloud storage.
My cloud backup is through Carbonite. Carbonite maintains "bank level" security both in the transmission of my data to their storage servers and encryption in the actual storage. There are other companies that 
provide similar service, each with different programs and extras. One extra I regularly use is the mobile app that lets me open any file on my smartphone. I don't need to leave my computer on, the data is always available in the cloud wherever I am.
Nothing is perfect but high grade encryption is reasonably secure in my opinion. I know if someone really wants to break into my data they will probably succeed but that's true for data stored in safe deposit boxes or anywhere.
Do you have a solution for data storage you think is very secure? Please share it so we can all learn to be safe with our data!
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