Why Data Backup is Vital to Your Business

The City of Riviera Beach, Florida was hit by a crippling ransomware attack in June of 2019 and ended up paying hackers $600,000. The City of Richmond Heights, Ohio was also hit by ransomware about a month later, but they escaped without paying a ransom at all.

The difference was that Richmond Heights had a recoverable backup of their data and the Florida municipality did not.

Regular data backups are one of the most important parts of any business IT plan and can ensure your business stays viable in the event of a major data loss incident.

While backing up data is something just about everyone knows they should do, all too often data loss occurs, and companies are left scrambling. They either don’t have a recent backup of their data or haven’t been checking a backup and find it’s failed.

Less than 10% of companies back up their data every day.

Most of a company’s files are now in digital format and represent the heart of what they do every day. From accounting records to customer order history to your marketing assets, most companies can’t operate without access to their data.

The Costs of Data Loss

Losing just a single file can mean hours of work recreating it. But in a data loss incident it’s generally many more than one file that’s lost. Entire servers or computer hard drives full of files can be gone in an instant.

The costs of data loss come both in the form of downtime while you don’t have access to the files you need to operate your business and the cost of reproducing those files (if you’re able to).

Here are some of the average costs of disruption due to downtime for various sized businesses:

• Small business: $8,000 per hour
• Medium business: $74,000 per hour
• Large company: $700,000 per hour

For many small businesses, it turns out that recovering from a costly data loss incident is the best case scenario because worst case can mean the loss of their company entirely.

Data loss isn’t just about losing records, it can bring down an entire organization, and does all too often.

Data breaches, such as ransomware attacks, are one of the common forms of data loss. A majority of small businesses that suffer a data breach (60%) end up going under within 6 months of the attack.

Adopt Backup Best Practices to Ensure Your Business Continuity

It’s important to understand the ways that data loss can occur to fully realize the importance to having a strong backup and recovery strategy.

Data loss happens due to:

• Malware/ransomware
• Accidental or malicious deletion
• Mechanical failure (like a hard drive crash)
• Lost or stolen device
• Human error (like a liquid spill)
• Natural disaster
• Manmade disaster
• Power failures
• Software issue

Many of these issues can come without warning and once it’s happened, it’s too late. You can’t turn back the clock to do a backup.

But you can start using backup best practices now to ensure you’re protected in the future.

Adopt the 3-2-1- Backup Rule

The 3-2-1 backup rule helps ensure redundancy to your backups and that you’re not putting all your eggs in one basket when it comes to the safety of your data. The rule goes like this:

• 3: Always have three full and updated copies of all your data
• 2: Ensure that two copies of your data are backed up to different types of storage media.
• 1: Keep one backup copy of your data offsite (for example, a cloud backup)

Check Backups Regularly or Use a Managed Backup Service

Many backups end up failing because they’ve hit some type of glitch that the user never knew about because they never checked their backup. Backups can fail because they run out of space, hit a file inconsistency, or run into some other type of problem.

If you’re backing up more than one device, it’s a good idea to use a managed backup service to ensure all data is being copied as it should across all devices.

Test Data Recovery

You don’t want the first time you test your data recovery to be when you’re in the middle of an emergency. Ensure that your team knows the steps to take to restore data and test the process to make sure it goes as smoothly as expected. This will ensure a fast recovery in the event you do suffer data loss and no unexpected surprises.

Back Up Cloud Services

A big mistake that businesses often make is to assume they don’t need to back up their data that’s in a program like Office 365. But cloud service providers can also have data loss incidents or outages, so you need to ensure that data is being backed up as well so you won’t be at a loss should anything happen to the cloud provider’s servers.

Reduce Your Stress & Leave Your Backups to Us!

Cleartech Group offers IT support services that include data backup and disaster recovery. This means you never have to worry about data loss, and if you have a breach or other incident, you can just call on us and we’ll get your files fully restored.

Contact us today to craft your personalized plan! Call us to chat at 978-466-1938 or reach out online.