4 Reasons Why Businesses Need to Regularly Back Up Information
It doesn’t matter how big your business is, regular backups are essential to securing your company’s network. In fact, regular backups may arguably be the single most important step you take for preventing a network disaster.
Backups help ensure that regardless of your current security strategy, you have secure and clean data to keep your business running in the case of data loss, a hack attack or even a natural disaster. Here are four reasons you need professional small-business IT support for backups and some tips for implementing a proper backup strategy.
Failure to Regularly Back Up Information Could Cost You Serious Money
Regular backups are an insurance policy for your business. With so much of the modern business supported by computer networks, a loss of your network data can have a crippling financial effect on your business.
A major survey of IT leaders from over 24 countries reported by Security Week found that incidents which led to data loss have increased by 400 percent in the last two years, for a combined loss of $1.7 trillion due to network downtime and data loss.
Even small security breaches impacting a small number of files, which many small businesses suffer from, can have a major impact. A report from Verizon found that small breaches, which involve the loss of fewer than 100 files, can cost your business between $18,120 and $35,730. Unless you have that kind of money to throw at a preventable problem regularly, then it’s time to implement an effective backup strategy.
Ransomware Can Strike at Any Time
Another trend that is growing across the world is the spread of ransomware. Once you’re hit with ransomware malware, your entire network is encrypted. At that point you’re locked out of your own network until you pay a ransom to hackers, usually with a crypto-currency like Bitcoin.
Don’t assume that your small business might fall under the radar from this type of attack. In fact, Oklahoma has been targeted with a variety of ransomware attacks. A Time Magazine’s story on ransomware begins with a ransomware attack on a law firm in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Due to their lack of security, small businesses are often the prime targets for ransomware attackers. With a secure backup of your system, you can help avoid paying the ransom and simply restore your data before you were infected with ransomware.
Without Backups, Natural Disasters Could Put You Out of Business
Statistics from FEMA indicate that 40 percent of businesses fail to open after suffering a natural disaster and additional 25 percent fail within a year. The United States Small Business Administration also finds that a whopping 90 percent of businesses fail two years after suffering a disaster. Part of the problem has to do with failure to back up data, leaving businesses starting from scratch following a disaster.
Unfortunately, many businesses still don’t perform proper backups. For example, one study found that 60 percent of small businesses don’t back up daily and many don’t perform backups at all.
Regularly Back Up Information – Provide Peace of Mind
Backups help you rebuild your network regardless what happens. Otherwise, you can lose important data like customer financial records, product information, payroll data, mailing lists and business plans. If a virus starts destroying your network, failure to restore your system from a clean backup can leave you with network outages that can last days or longer, destroying customer confidence in the process.
In some cases, it’s not a matter of hack attacks or malware, but simple data corruption. Backups help you go back in time before you experienced network issues and quickly restore your network.
It’s no exaggeration to say that even one incident of major data loss can mean game over for your business. Backups ultimately allow you to focus your business efforts on what delivers value instead of always looking over your shoulder for a network security disaster. With cost-effective backup strategies available from professional managed IT service providers like Dobson Technologies, there is simply no reason your business should go without a regular backup policy.
The Right Backup Strategy
Dobson Technologies is dedicated to ensuring secure backups as a part of managed IT support in Oklahoma City.
Cloud Backups: Cloud backups are an essential part of a smart backup strategy. Cloud backups help ensure that if your business suffers a natural disaster, you are able to restore your data off-site.
Encryption of Data In-Transit: Backup data should be encrypted when in transit, otherwise hackers can snoop on data. A smart encryption plan is key to overall data protection across your network.
The 3-2-1 Strategy: There are different backup strategies. However, the 3-2-1 strategy for backups is highly effective. It involves three backups located in two locations, such as on-premise and cloud storage locations. Finally, you should produce these backups at least once a day for maximum protection.
24/7 Support: When your network goes down or you suffer data loss, you want a partner that can quickly restore your system from a backup no matter what day or time it is.
Testing Backups: It’s important you work with a provider that tests the integrity of backups. The last thing you want is to restore your network with a backup that has data corruption problems or other issues. A backup report can let you know if any files failed to transfer or if any corruptions occurred.