Antoine Harb, the Business Development Manager and Team Leader for the Middle East and North Africa at Kingston Technology, speaks to Small Enterprise about the importance of backing up your data

Do companies understand that it is important to back up their data?
Most companies are aware of the importance of data and keeping it secure. This is because of some regional incidents that included attacks on business that lost data in the process. Most companies do follow a strict policy in place to back up and secure their data.

What according to you are customers’ challenges when it comes to handling data?
There are plenty of challenges. Even though many companies restrict usage of USB and block the USB port, there are employees who bring a USB drive from outside and use that in their corporate network. These USB drives could contain viruses that can bring an entire network down and corrupt data.

How does Kingston work with companies to handle these challenges?
The best way is to educate customers on how to handle the data in a more optimum way. They should use a data storage solution that is secure. We do offer many options for the corporate sector – one of which is a USB drive that encrypts data with AES 256 encryption.

These USB drives are called DataTraveler Locker and IronKey that locks data and keeps it secure. It is hardware encryption and hence, the data is secure. On one of our USB drives, we also offer built-in antivirus. So, in case any customer or employee is trying to save data from somewhere and there is a virus in that machine, this virus will not be copied onto the USB drive. This way the user will not be able to unknowingly infect the corporate network.

Tell us about your channel community.
We do have different types of channel partners. However, for our security products, we work with two channel partners including StarLink. We do have a channel partner program in place and we also offer training programs for certification. We have a team of business development managers in the region, and we directly visit the customer facilities to train them in handling their data in a very professional manner.

What according to you are the best practices for small businesses when it comes to handling data optimally?
Most small companies do not have a system or policy in place that helps them keep their data secure. So if they have to use a USB drive to store data we suggest them to use something which has encryption and other security features built into them. We suggest them to use our SSDs which also come with AES 256 encryption built into it.