How to Protect Your ERP Database

An ERP database is perhaps one of the most vital assets your company owns, storing critical business information that departments across your back office need in order to operate effectively. Keeping that ERP database fully protected from threats such as security breaches, performance issues, and technical breakdowns is crucial to ensuring continuity and consistency in your most important business activities.

Valuable Tips to Keep Your ERP Data Protected

Continuous Up-time
What happens when your ERP database goes down?  Human resources, production planning, procurement, accounting and finance, and other critical back-office functions could potentially come to a screeching halt.

With advanced administration techniques such as 24 x 7 system monitoring and redundant server set-ups, you can ensure that your ERP database is available and readily accessible at all times. By monitoring performance around-the-clock, system administrators can immediately identify and troubleshoot problems, to prevent productivity slow downs caused by down time. Additionally, mirroring your ERP database using redundant servers can provide a much-needed backup that can be utilized in the event of a major system failure.

Preventing Unauthorized Access
Your ERP database contains highly sensitive and confidential information about your company, its products, and its financial status. Letting that data fall into the wrong hands could pose severe consequences for your business.

There are many steps that can be taken to improve the security and protection of your ERP database. For example, role-based IDs and passwords will ensure that users can access only the data they are authorized to view, based on their job function or position within the company. By making users change their passwords on a regular basis (experts recommend every six months, especially if you offer ERP database access to suppliers, vendors, and other external business partners), you can add an additional layer of security. Data encryption, firewalls, and other measures can help you keep hackers from your ERP database.

Disaster Recovery
Few companies are as prepared as they should be for a major event such as a fire or a flood. Without a solid, well-designed back-up plan in place, natural disasters such as these can result in a permanent loss of the mission-critical information contained in your ERP database. This could cost your company millions of dollars, and set you back years in terms of business growth. Your ERP database should be backed up at least once a week, although daily or nightly backs are recommended and offer the most protection to an off-site location.

Protect the Entire Enterprise Infrastructure
While some companies use an ERP implementation as an opportunity to replace all of their old legacy business applications with newer, more powerful ones, most incorporate their new ERP applications into their existing framework, and often find themselves with multiple different systems working side by side.

So, the most important thing to remember when putting measures in place to protect your ERP environment is to not only safeguard the ERP database and related systems, but to secure all other systems that share information with it.