If there is a business owner in the world that hasn’t heard the term “data backup,” he or she has likely been operating off the grid. Statistics vary, but all suggest nearly 100% of businesses backup their data at least once a year. We’ll let that stat sink in for a minute… once… a… year.
Imagine if your firm lost its data due to a physical disaster or a system crash and you hadn’t backed it up for a year. Data recovery would be cumbersome, if not impossible. Data loss could be incalculable because you might not even know what had not been restored.
We’re hoping that your firm backs up its data more often than once a year, but that doesn’t mean you are backing it up often enough. Even backing up once a week — or every day — doesn’t ensure your firm would be able to perform 100% file recovery.
How is this possible? There are four types of backups, and some of them do not back up all of a firm’s data each time (more about that, later.) The result could be lost files if some were accidentally deleted between backups.
Furthermore, in companies with multiple locations — or even multiple departments — unless the firm has a companywide solution for best practices data backup, with in-house or third-party data recovery services, a system failure will almost certainly result in lost data — and management may not even know it.
At this point, you may be, thinking, “I have heard all of this before. What’s different?” Perhaps you assume your firm’s current backup program is sufficient, and that you would be able to recover files if needed. Here’s the rub. Unless you have a fully redundant data backup solution or service, managed by a professional third-party company that takes responsibility for the data, your business is definitely at risk.
What’s different from 10 or even five years ago is that your data has become a prime commodity for hackers, who are happy to work overtime. Although a best-practices backup solution cannot prevent your data from being stolen (that’s a discussion for a different day), it can ensure you recover it.
Per an October 2020 report in Cybercrime Magazine, cybercrime is predicted to inflict damages totaling $6 Trillion by 2021 — double the cost in 2015. That total includes damage and destruction of data, theft of intellectual property and personal/financial data, deletion of hacked data, and restoration of systems including backup copies, among other expenses. If the unthinkable happens to your firm, wouldn’t you rather the price tag be minimized?
Any company can become a target of hacking — or can have their data compromised or damaged in other ways. However, firms that manage and store databases of PII (personally identifiable information) are at higher risk than most. Not only are they more attractive targets, but they can also experience greater loss in the form of sanctions, penalties and other punishments if their data is stolen, accidentally overwritten or even damaged.
If your firm fits into this category — you are in the legal, healthcare or financial industries, for example — having a third-party backup and restoration solution can literally save your firm. Working with a respected provider may also make it easier for you to meet compliance requirements.
Of course, this doesn’t negate the importance of best-practices backup and restore for firms that are not highly regulated. Few, if any companies could afford to lose access to their customer records (both service and financial), product information, payroll data, mailing lists, business plans and other mission-critical documents.
Even if your firm has a data backup solution in place, it’s prudent to ensure it meets your current needs — and the realities of the business landscape. Following are activities you can conduct to confirm the scope and substance of your backup needs. (If this list is beyond your firm’s expertise, we invite you to check out our data backup solution, the ITS Data Vault, and avoid this aggravation.)
This information makes it possible to estimate your firm’s business exposure if a backup should fail or could not be completely restored. Once your firm is ready to explore backup solutions, the next step is to consider how you select a provider.
The four backup methods are full, mirror, incremental and differential. All of them have pros and cons, which makes careful selection important.
Data is the lifeblood of any company, and the firm to which you entrust it should be someone in whom you have the utmost confidence.
Following are some of the top-priority questions company representatives should ask:
Faced with the complexity of managing backup programs and the potential for business disaster if something goes wrong, many companies are opting for another approach — an end-to-end, packaged solution for backup and recovery. These solutions are sometimes referred to as Backup as a Service (BaaS).
With BaaS, all backed-up files, folders and drives are housed in a remote repository that organizations access over their high-speed network connection. File restoration can be very granular (single files) or can encompass a folder, a server or the full archive.
In these scenarios, responsibility for data backup, continuity and access is in the hands of the provider and not the organization’s technical staff. Equally important, the company is putting its faith in the provider to ensure the reliability of the infrastructure that underpins the backup service.
Although BaaS represents a significant step from in-house management of on-site hardware, we recommend decision makers dig a little deeper than just the software that runs the backups. First of all, although BaaS incorporates secure data backup, it is not the most secure option. Any time data transitions from one system to another it may be placed at risk.
Second, transitioning to BaaS (or nearly any third-party managed backup solution) involves a number of steps that make the project more complex than it needs to be. These include:
Wouldn’t your firm prefer to avoid all of this? As noted earlier, data security has become mission critical. The best possible scenario is to enable a secure, unbroken end-to-end transfer between a secure client backup appliance and the backup provider’s secure location, running over the backup provider’s secure network with no need to address legacy data platforms at all.
The ITS Data Vault achieves all of these goals. If you are wondering how you can persuade your manager or other decision maker to adopt such an approach, feel free to share this article. If they remain unconvinced, tell them the experts at IT Solutions will be happy to have a full discussion regarding data backup and restoration with no obligation whatsoever. We can always be reached at 866.PICK.ITS.
We’ve got answers — fast, clear, and tailored to your needs. Let’s talk tech.
