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Seven Deadly Sins of Home Office Security

Whether your home office is for the occasional WAH or you're running a business from the house, are you guilty of one of these security oversights?

By Joan Goodchild, Senior Editor

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"What if you have someone to the office and they trip and fall?" Zbar said "I have insurance that covers me for some of that stuff, but I don't want to have to go through that."

Forgetting to back up data

Ever had a sudden power outage and lost a few hours' work? Or worse, ever fried a hard-drive and lost everything? Data backups are a simple and necessary discipline.

There are many different ways to back up your data these days. Each one comes with a different price in terms of both money and time, said Krein. One obvious solution is to buy an external hard drive and keep to an appropriate schedule for manually backing up data. The danger with this plan, however, is that you may still lose information in the event of a system failure if you haven't manually backed up yet.

Other options include online storage services, network-attached storage, and disk imaging software. All are good backup technologies, said Krein. The most important point is simply to choose a solution and use it.

Krein also recommends having an uninterruptible power supply, or battery backup, in case of a power failure.

"With a battery backup ready to go, if you lose power, you'll still have time to continue to work and make sure you aren't losing anything," he said.

There are three kinds of UPS: standby, line interactive and online. They all provide battery backup, but they work in different ways. Figuring out which one you need depends on the kind of protection you require.

home office security: seventh deadly sin

Failing to consider bigger business continuity issues

If you work exclusively from home, your office is your world when it comes to your career. But many fail to consider the possibility of how to continue working if certain conditions, such as weather, or a fire, force one out of the house indefinitely.

Zbar is a vet in preparing for the worst because of his South Florida location.

"I always wonder what someone in Massachusetts or New York must think when I say, we have a storm coming, I might not be available for few days."

But these days, Zbar, who has worked from home since 1989, finds he rarely has to lose a day of productivity if a storm hits. Cloud computing gives him the ability to work from just about anywhere. However, those who have everything stored on a hard drive on a computer that has to be left at home may not be so lucky. Ditto for those who need to get their hands on sensitive documents that have no digital copy elsewhere.

"Everything you need on a day-to-day basis needs to be remembered if you are going to keep things running," said Zbar.