Controlling Your Agency’s Data
About this episode
JUNE 26, 2020
Data is one of the most important assets for any organization, yet most people don’t treat it as such. As most of us return to work after the shutdown from the COVID-19 pandemic, we are expecting a sprawl of data, as most people were working from home on personal devices. Now is the time to gain control of where your data is located and be fully prepared for the worst-case scenario. In this episode of the GEEK FREAKS PODCAST, our very own Ron Harris explains how properly backing up your data could potentially save your agency years’ worth of information.
THIS WEEK ON THE HOT SEAT
RON HARRIS
VICE PRESIDENT AT OMEGA COMPUTER SERVICES
- 15 years in the industry.
- Enjoys spending time with his family, riding his Harley, and finding time to sleep.
- Fun fact: Ron broke both of his arms.
- He's a simple person, enjoys work, but also enjoys being alone reading a book or learning something new. Loves candy DOTs!
VIEW TRANSCRIPT >
Ep. 28 - Controlling Your Agency's Data
Ron: (00:00) Welcome to the Insurance Hot Seat, a special series by the Geek Freaks Podcast, dedicated to answering the tough questions in the insurance industry,
Speaker 2: (00:08) [Intro Music]
Ron: (00:21) Welcome to the podcast, another solo podcast, I'm Ron Harris. And today I wanted to talk about data and I guess, backups of that data. So we never talk about data in the sense of, in the sense of that. It's one of the most important assets to any organization. So if you're listening to this and you're a, maybe a second or third generation business owner, or you're getting ready to take over the agency, or, you know, maybe you just work in marketing, whatever the case is that data that you're harvesting or have been collecting over the years, or, you know, meeting with prospects and tracking and logging is one of the most important things any business could have, but yet we treat it like it doesn't matter. Now, when I say it doesn't matter, it doesn't mean that it's not important. We just do whatever needs to be done with that data.
Ron: (01:14) And we never really ask questions. So let me paint a picture. You go into the gas station, you get out of - I get out of my truck, I lock my car. What's in my car, that's important? I got some business cards, a few or really nice G2 pens love those pens. And, uh, an iPhone charger, nothing of super importance, but I make sure my truck is locked every time I get out of it. But I couldn't tell you the last time I backed up my iPhone. I have pictures of my kids, my family, um, every everything on there, right? And my life is on my phone and I never back it up. So that got me to thinking like, what, what are we doing to take care of that data? Now, if you are a second or third generation business owner, your grandparents, your parents, everybody's worked super hard to harvest, to gather that information, whether it's on prospects or competitors, whatever it is that has taken time.
Ron: (02:09) Now think of it in the sense of you right now with the environment that we're in with COVID and work from home, that data that we've worked so hard to protect and to build up that that information store is everywhere. It's it's on laptops, it's on desktops, it's on home computers, it's on tablets. It's in personal email, it's everywhere because when this whole thing happened, we did anything we could do to make the next thing happen. So we had to do what we had to, we had to do what we had to do. That's a lot of hads to doin'. And, um, to make sure that you guys could service customers, to make sure that your business was still going to be equitable, right. Now, that also causes data sprawl. So in a sense, you know, maybe I have some, um, work files in my Dropbox, in my One Drive on my laptop, but it never hits the server.
Ron: (03:10) So is it really backed up? Have we ever asked that question? You know, um, a lot of agency management software or ERPs, do we ever ask that question? Like how is our data backed up? They're gonna say, yeah, yeah, sure it's backed up. Microsoft do they back up our data? I mean, they have redundancies built in, but do they actually back it up? And I bet if you look through the, the agreement and everything that you sign, it's probably not backed up to the standards that we would like as the business owner. And I know I have thousands of emails and I'm sure people listening have many, many more emails than I do, and we don't really care about it. Right. It's not being treated as what it is, which is a super important asset. You wouldn't pump gas, go in the gas station and not lock your car.
Ron: (03:55) Maybe some of you would, but I don't, you know what I mean? And again, there's nothing there it's not years and years of people's lives and information that could be potentially harmful if it gets out, you know, if it's PHI or anything else like that. Um, for the most part, we don't do anything. So I think it's time as business owners and, uh, anybody in the organization to start to try to think about ways, you know, what are we doing with, with our data? Is it on my laptop? Is it on my personal laptop? Is it on my phone? Is it on my tablet? What happens if my tablet breaks or my iPhone, you know, gets washed or thrown in the lake or, you know, I drop it. Nothing is indestructable these days. I mean, they, they practically make devices to be thrown away. So of course they're going to break, but what are we doing with our data on it now, again, are we, are we using the information?
Ron: (04:50) Um, are we taking for granted the way our information is stored with our vendors? You know, um, is if, if a agency management platform goes down, what happens to my data or who owns my data? Now, I'm assuming that in the contract, it says you own the data, but how do you get that data back? What if you want to transfer to a different program, are they going to charge you money to get your data back? That's an interesting thought because it happens all the time. We've been lucky enough to have customers that have allowed us to work with them on projects, to move them from one agency management platform to the other. And you're paying sometimes tens of thousands of dollars to get your data out of that system. Now, when we go into that situation, we say, do you have a backup of your data?
Ron: (05:37) And no, we don't. It's all in the cloud or it's all on this platform or it's this, that, and the other thing, not a big to do, but now we're going to have to pay to get that data back. And that's something to think about on every level right now, where is our data? How's it being accessed, who's accessing it, did all these devices we just to work from home. Were those, were those approved devices? Were they able to access stuff on the network? It's all stuff we have to consider as we start to make this switch to coming back into the office, you know, we've had a conversation with a customer that was working from home on an approved device, and they were looking for a file. They were back in the office and they said, where's that file. We looked and looked and looked and looked.
Ron: (06:20) We couldn't find the file. Oh, the files on their MacBook at home. It's that kind of stuff that is going to create this sprawl of data. And that could be potentially, um, troublesome for any business, right? Whether it's PHI or social security numbers, credit cards, whatever it is. I don't know what people are storing. Um, we ourselves, we store tickets and we store client information in different programs. That's it? Um, we've been lucky enough when we moved from service desk software to the next one, that it imports and exports pretty quickly and seamlessly. And we use it ourselves. Now we have backups. We pull the data down and then we import it. So we have the old data, but it doesn't really mean that that data is going to be in that system forever. If they have a crash or something happens, what happens then nobody knows that's the scariest part of this whole thing is, and that's why we're talking is that that's time to ask those questions, whether it's to your provider or your vendor, is what, you know, what, who owns data, what happens if something happens to your server?
Ron: (07:26) Where's my data stored? Do I have access to my data? Who's data who owns the data? These are things we have to start asking now because as the cloud becomes, um, a bigger behemoth than it already is, and we become more pulled apart, you know, not working centralized in an office anymore. There's going to be a lot of devices that have a lot of access and a lot of information. So as you move forward into whatever, the next phase of this is, start thinking about that, you know, do we want to have desktops, or do we want to have laptops that we can kind of retain control on? And you could do it a handful of ways, right? So here with our any financial or insurance based organization, uh, we encrypt the drives on the mobile devices. We set it up with two form factor authentication, um, you know, really good antivirus.
Ron: (08:15) And they take that everywhere. Now, the idea is, is that they're using a work supplied device with mobility to work wherever they need to work. I mean, you can get laptops with LTE cards in it, so you can have internet anywhere. Um, you can buy military grade laptops. So if you're working in maybe a hazardous, not hazardous environment, but a construction site, or maybe you're a mechanic or your whoever, whatever the job is, you can get hardware that will withstand whatever punishment you're going to put it through. And you don't have the failure. Like there was another conversation I had with a prospect as well "We've had a lot of hard drives die." Well, they typically don't die anymore because they're solid state drives (SSD). Gone are the days of the spinning drives. They're slow. They're not, uh, they're not even, you can get them. They're dirt cheap actually, but they're not being put in devices out of the, out of the cart anymore.
Ron: (09:08) So it's time if you're still rocking that old, you know, cow gateway box machine there, it's time to put it away and get something new. And again, what we're pushing and what we're hearing and what the industry is doing is it's time to get mobile. Um, if the current events haven't showed us anything is that the old business model has its flaws and as scared of the mobility and, you know, data sprawl and all that we are, people not being able to work when we're forced to work from home for two months is a lot worse, especially because there's a lot of things you can do to keep people in their lane when it comes to their data and their hardware. So before you purchase that ERP or move to that agency management software, or even move your email to the cloud, you know, again, what we do with our emails, we back it up locally.
Ron: (10:02) So everything in Office 365 is pulled down to a very large, um, NAS and it's stored. And if anything happens to Office 365, or we somehow unceremoniously leave Office 365, we have our emails and they can be imported to the next platform. A lot of companies don't do that because they just, again, we take everything for granted, the cloud's great. It's resilient. These companies are big. They're great. I mean, you think about Gmail who makes almost a hundred percent of their revenue, but that's probably way too high, but a lot of the revenue on our data that we provide them. So now we are the profit center for them. So now if you're running business email from them, now we don't use Gmail. So I can't speak to this intelligently, but if we use, if you use that platform, are they reading your work emails?
Ron: (10:50) Are they harvesting data on your business? And then reselling that to your advertiser, their advertising advertisers? I can't talk. I'm sure they are. I don't know if it's true, but in my head it sounds like a perfect crime, but that's just stuff we have to think about now, because life is going to be a lot different. You know, when a majority of the offices are going to start opening up very soon and it's going to be a lot different. I've had a lot of conversations with business owners about, you know, data, backups. How are we going to collect this data? Does it make sense to move it to SharePoint instead of having a file server, which in most cases it does. It's a very low cost platform to run. It's already included with your Office 365 subscription and files are available everywhere without needing a VPN or without having to download it on the machine.
Ron: (11:35) There's a lot of pluses that are going to come out of this, but there's a lot of negatives. And again, we have to start treating the data that we currently have as the gold that it is years and years and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours has been spent to harvest that data. But we treat it so disposable, you know, um, yeah, I'm going to upload this to my CRM. And if something, I don't even think about something happening to them because I hopefully can get it back, but we just give it to other people to handle and hope that nothing happens. And I think it's time that we all start thinking about what if something happens. It's not just, if something happens, it's when something happens, we're seeing it with ransomware. We're seeing it with other viruses. We're seeing it with some of the big vendors in the virtualization that we're selling VDI.
Ron: (12:21) So virtualized desktops for the cloud, they're shutting their doors. Hundreds of thousands of people no longer have their desktops they've been logging into because they couldn't survive the COVID, the COVID crash, I guess you would say. What happens to their stuff? Do they get it back? I hope I'm sure, but something to think about as this world starts to get back to normal and we start turning the lights in the office. What does that mean for your organization or agency? Does that mean that it's time to start looking at these desktops that are aging, um, that maybe aren't aging, but they're just desktops as this does it mean we should start looking at what's the next iteration of this. Do we need a brick and mortar, um, is mobility the frontline is making sure our data is secured and backed up? Is it okay to reach out to, you know, the big agency management software and be like, Hey, can I get a copy of my data just in case?
Ron: (13:13) Ask those questions, please, please. Everybody ask those questions because nobody knows what's going to happen next. It could be, you know, that will never happen because they're too big to fail. But if something happens to Microsoft, millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of billions of emails and accounts are gone, and what happens, we just pick up and start the next day without any emails. I know I couldn't, if you were to go in and delete every email in my inbox, I, I don't know what I would do, but again, we care about, I care about the G2 pens in my car and my business cards and my iPhone charger more than I care about the pictures of my family or my kids, you know, as they're growing up, it's something to think about and think about it.
Ron: (13:56) It's important. It's going to become a much bigger thing. So if anybody listening has any questions about it or products that they can use, don't hesitate to reach out to us. We're here, we're here to help. We want to help. And we have a lot of tools that we could use. Some of them are even free that you could use to, um, keep your, you know, keep it in the cloud, but get a nice backup of it. So in case something happens, you know, an apocalypse or a meltdown of an industry, you're going to be able to survive. And you're gonna be able to use all that data that everybody's worked super hard for. Could you imagine that you go to launch, let's say your agency management platform and all your contacts are gone. All your activities are gone. All your policy information is gone and you call them and they say, well, we don't know what happens our servers down and all your data's gone.
Ron: (14:42) Very sorry. Goodbye. Oh, what? Yours gone? Just like that. You know, a lot of you, a lot, everybody, a lot of people have filing cabinets. So I guess it's back to that, right? You go to that old three drawer, you pull it out and you start ripping through policies or request and downloads outside of your platform to figure out what you need to do for your customers. Sure. Life will go on and it's not the end of the world, but it's gonna set you back. Whether it's over time or just trying to figure out what's next, the business is going to stall. And as a vendor and a partner of a lot of companies, our job is not to allow your business to stall. And if you don't have a good partner or you don't use anything to back up your data or kind of keep an eye on your data, find somebody that will help you because nothing is foolproof or future-proof, you know, the biggest thing, um, that causes issues with data and viruses and everything is, is us.
Ron: (15:38) Is people, curiosity, panic, fear, they prey on everything. And you know, if something happens, we got to make sure we can move forward. And as we come back into the office, start thinking about that. How did this go? How okay. We shipped everybody home. Everything was great. Okay. Why do we have 17 copies of the spreadsheet in the, uh, in the shared drive? Well, I don't know. That's a good question. Well, because 17 people took it home and they made their changes and they put it back. It's going to happen, guys, gals be prepared for it. Think about it. Love it. Love your data. Take care of your data. Love each other. Enjoy your summer big holiday coming up. So enjoy it. We'll talk to you soon. If you need anything, reach out, take it easy.
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