It's the biggest shopping time of the year and a record number of store clerks and customers are using mobile devices to record credit card data and other personal information. Is your data safe?

KPMG reports 160 million people had personal information hacked, leaked or deleted this year – a whopping 40 percent jump. Meanwhile, Christmas shoppers are increasingly buying online – a 30 percent gain this year. Mobile sales nearly doubled as traditional retailers increasingly introduce new mobile devices on store floors.

"You can insure against a financial loss; you can't insure against a data loss," said Online Tech CEO Yan Ness.

Expanding to meet exploding demand for secure data, Online Tech received a $20 million investment from News-Press & Gazette Company to build four additional data centers across the Midwest and continues to add staff to its Ann Arbor headquarters.

Online Tech is increasingly strengthening its standards for data safety ahead of stricter industry and government standards on the horizon.

The company is also growing after Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina showed the potential vulnerability of many data centers. Michigan, in comparison, is safer from natural disaster than any other state in the Continental U.S. Companies in flood-prone areas are looking more to the nation’s “North Coast" in the Midwest.

Other parts of the nation suffered some high profile data breaches recently:

• South Carolina’s Department of Revenue was recently breached, impacting sensitive data for 3.8 million residents. Investigators found the breach started with a phishing email in August.
• Hackers breached credit card keypads at 63 Barnes & Noble stores, stealing credit card information for customers across the country.
• Retailer Zappos lost the personal details — including physical and email addresses — of 24 million customers.

Trustwave’s 2012 Global Security Report recently found: customer records comprised 89 percent of all breached data investigated; more than a third of all 2011 breaches occurred in the franchise industry; third-parties were responsible for introducing security deficiencies in 76 percent of all breaches and data in-transit were targeted in 62.5 percent of data breaches.

Disaster Recovery Webinar Series

Online Tech is hosting a three-part series of interactive, educational disaster recovery webinars spanning several weeks in January and February 2013. This webinar series is ideal for any organization interested in IT disaster recovery and business continuity planning. In the first webinar, Online Tech Systems Support Manager and CISSP, Steve Aiello will cover an overview of business continuity and disaster recovery with real company examples as well as the benefits of developing a business continuity plan. Business Continuity in Lean Times will be held Tuesday, January 15 at 2 P.M. ET. Register for the full series online.

About Online Tech

Online Tech, Michigan’s largest managed data center is becoming the largest in the Midwest, expanding into at least four new markets. The “Fort Knox" for data is known for complete redundancy - “backups for everything” - from multiple back-up generators and backup systems to locations straddling two power grids and even two CEOs.

Online Tech leads in secure, compliant hosting services including cloud hosting, managed dedicated servers, Michigan colocation and disaster recovery. Online Tech’s Midwest data centers assure mission critical applications are always available, comply with government & industry regulations, and continue operating after a disaster. Backed by independent HIPAA, PCI, SSAE 16, and SOC 2, Online Tech delivers the security, privacy, and availability expected from world class data center operators. For more information, call (877)740-5028, email contactus@onlinetech.com or visit www.onlinetech.com.