Does your business have an effective solution in place?

Why should you have backups?

Security of data has become an integral part of modern businesses with the threat of data breaches increasing greatly in the past five years. Ransomware itself has exponentially grown in the past two years and with COVID-19 and many staff working from home this can expose flaws in businesses security processes if they haven’t adapted to the changing landscape.

A study last year from Cyber Security Ventures showed that ransomware costs will reach 20 billion USD worldwide in 2021 after being only 325 million USD in 2015. And it’s not just ransomware that can negatively affect businesses with DDos attacks, supply chain attacks and zero-day exploits to software that are constant threats.

These facts highlight the importance of data security and integrity in the current landscape, below we’ll go through the main reasons why you need to backup your data.

• Preventative measures to stop data loss from hackers and other causes don’t always work and you can have the strongest firewall with the strictest security measures but there will always be an increased risk if you don’t employ a backup strategy.
• Saving time and getting back online quickly. Restoring data to the original form as quickly as possible is the highest priority for business owners and without backups this can almost be impossible. Ensuring you have at least a 3-2-1 method for backups is key. This refers to have three separate backups over two different mediums such as tape and hard disk with one offsite backup. This strategy is a bare minimum and it is often preferred by businesses to have more offsite backups.
• Data loss can occur at any time for many reasons and such as theft, failure, basic user error, crashes and natural disaster. A recent statistic showed that 60% of small and medium businesses that lose their data will shutdown within 6 months.
• Loss of customer trust. If customers know that you’ve lost their data through whatever means the reputation of your business will suffer, you will likely lose customers, struggle to gain new ones and employees may hesitate to join your business. Adversely, being vigilant with backups and being able to demonstrate proper security measures increases customer confidence.

What Strategies Should You Introduce Going Forward?

Going on from this it’s important to put steps in place to ensure you backup and recovery go as smoothly as possible. If you haven’t already you should be implementing these methods;

• Write up a Disaster Recovery Plan, if you already have one ensure its up-to-date. A Disaster Recovery Plan outlining the backup procedure amongst other things is essential for all types of businesses whether small or large. The plan generally covers risk reduction methods, testing schedule, who is involved and procedures for getting back to normal working conditions as quickly and efficiently as possible.
• Employ at least the 3-2-1 rule for backups, ensuring that by having multiple backups they provide good failsafe measures from each other.
• If you plan on using cloud-based backups ensure that you use a true cloud backup service as using services like Dropbox and Google Drive are limited in version history and lack automatic backup functionality.

The most important step is to start thinking about these methods and questioning what your business does to ensure its data integrity and security.

If you need any assistance setting up a backup solution contact our office and IT consultant can point you in the right direction.