When you’re wrapped up in the day-to-day hustle of your work, it becomes all too easy to overlook the importance of reliable backups. That is, until you try to recover a critical system, or even that one single file you desperately need.
That’s why creating reliable backups remains one of the most important activities you and your IT staff can perform.
Backups protect your company’s valuable business data from a variety of potential dangers, and enable fast, effective system recovery when necessary.
Let’s look at some specific situations in which the existence of backups can make an enormous difference in how much damage is done to an organization.
In each case, the absence of a backup plan for the associated resources or computing systems can turn out to be a very expensive oversight.
Main Causes of Data Loss
Data loss occurs for a number of reasons.
What’s frustrating, though, is that most of the causes are completely out of your control.
Preparing for these events – some of which remain inevitable – creates the best way to minimize the effects of downtime or data loss.
Human Error Is Reason Enough for Reliable Backups
Despite employees’ best efforts and intentions, human error remains the most common cause of data loss.
The term ‘human error’ encompasses a wide variety of actions, including accidentally deleting files, inadvertently spilling coffee on a laptop, or even mistyping a filename, overwriting business-critical data.
While training programs can certainly help, human error is impossible to fully eliminate.
That makes it all the more important you maintain a proper data backup policy.
Hardware Failure Is Inevitable
First, the good news: hardware quality and resiliency have drastically improved since computing’s early days.
However, while the occurrence of hardware failures may have diminished, it certainly hasn’t disappeared.
Every product, hardware piece, and physical device has an expiration date. And, unfortunately, these devices don’t usually provide much warning before failure.
For instance, an unexpected disk drive failure can result in serious data loss, leaving you scrambling for answers if you’re unprepared.
Recovering from this type of failure requires reliable backups of the affected data.
Malware May Delete Your Data
Malware has certainly earned it’s bad reputation over the years, and often leads to data loss or file corruption.
While ransomware garners most of the headlines, it’s not the only type of malware that can affect your IT environment. For instance, some forms of malware may randomly delete or corrupt files.
In the wake of a malware attack, you might find it nearly impossible to resume normal operations without a reliable data backup system in place.
Cyberattacks Can Cripple Your Business
Other types of cybercrime, such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, can impact the accessibility of business-critical systems and information.
Backups enable your organization to rebuild systems quickly, so your customers and employees can access important data resources.
Natural Disasters Are Unpredictable
As if you didn’t have enough to worry about from human error or purposeful attacks, Mother Nature can wreak havoc on your business, too.
Ice storms, hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes are just some of the natural disasters that can impact a data center and bring down an IT environment.
Reliable backups form a critical component of disaster recovery plans, and must be available to respond to the effects of a natural disaster.
Malicious Insiders
Unfortunately, malicious insiders can also be responsible for data loss or corruption.
For instance, disgruntled employees may intentionally delete data on their way out the door, or even allow cybercriminals to access infrastructure where they can cause damage.
Once again, proper backups allow you to recover from these situations with minimal consequences.
Managed Backup Services Protect Your Data and Save You Time
While predicting future hardware failures, security incidents, or the next natural disaster is next to impossible, creating a reliable data backup plan isn’t.
It starts by assessing how much data you’re comfortable losing, and going from there. For instance, if you can manage to lose one week’s worth of data, you may only need to back up your systems weekly. If a system is used less frequently, with less critical data, maybe monthly backups will suffice.
Once you’ve decided frequency, you’ll want to consider storage options. Here, you’ll need to decide to store backup data on location or off-premises, like cloud solutions
While on-premise storage solutions might help in the event of a cyberattack or hardware failure, they won’t be of use if something like a fire or flood destroys your equipment.
Fortunately, these aren’t decisions you need to make on your own.
Ideal Integrations, along with the support of our cybersecurity division, Blue Bastion, can help.
At Ideal, we offer managed services that include developing and executing backup solutions for your cloud or on-premises data center.
We’ll ensure all critical data is backed up and available to quickly recover business-critical systems. Let us handle your backups, while you and your team focus on running your business.
Simply contact us today at 412-349-6680, or fill out the form below, and our security and IT experts will gladly provide a no-obligation consultation outlining your options and best solutions.
If – or likely, when – the day comes that an incident occurs, you’ll be glad you did.