From customer records to invoices, emails, financial data, project files, website content, CRM data, and legal documents, data makes running your business possible every day. This is easy to forget when things are going well and it’s all smooth sailing – but what happens when data goes missing?
In this blog, our experts are putting a spotlight on data loss, and the importance of data backup and recovery solutions to ensure you can prevent downtime, financial loss, reputational damage, and even legal consequences.
How Can Data Be Lost?
There are many factors that can cause data loss, including:
- Hardware Failure – If you’re using on-premises servers, hardware malfunction or failure can put your data at risk. So how does this happen? Old hardware that needs replacing can fail, while issues can also be caused by power surges or outages, overheating, and physical damage to servers.
- Human Error – Staff might accidentally delete or overwrite files, and not realise their mistake until it’s too late and the data can’t be recovered.
- Cyber Attacks – This includes ransomware, malware, phishing, and malicious insider attacks. Ransomware is a serious concern for data loss, as it involves cyber criminals encrypting your data to remove access before demanding a ransom be paid to get it back. Making the payment also doesn’t mean your data or files will be restored, and in fact we recommend never paying it as it can put a target on your back in future for more attacks.
- Natural Disasters – Flooding, fires, storms, earthquakes, and other natural disasters can all contribute to data loss, affecting on premises IT infrastructure through physical damage or power outages.
How Backups Prevent Data Loss
If you want to safeguard your data in the face of these factors and prevent loss, you’re going to need reliable backups – which are essential for business continuity and ransomware protection. You can use cloud or local backups, so let’s take a quick look at the difference below.
- Cloud Backups
These backups use private or public cloud-based servers for storage, and are ideal to safeguard your data against natural disasters and physical hardware failure. This option can support cost-effectiveness, accessibility (you can access them anywhere, at any time), security, and scalability to support growth or changing requirements.
- Local Backups
Local backups are on-premises, and allow you to have more control (this includes security measures), access your data without being connected to the internet, and expect speedy access to reduce downtime during the recovery process. This option can also support data privacy requirements and data sovereignty regulations.
If a hybrid backup strategy is right for your business, you might use both of these methods.
The Importance of Regular Backups and Redundancy
Without up to date backups, you could lose days or weeks of work and critical information. When even one day of lost data can have a huge impact, it’s important to regularly backup your data at multiple locations (known as redundancy) for a strategy that supports fast data restoration and recovery with minimal disruption.
Alongside this, all your backups should be tested regularly to ensure they’re reliable and ready to go when you need them most. The last thing you want is to experience a data loss incident to find your solutions aren’t working, so this needs to be an ongoing priority. If a managed service provider (MSP) is handling your data backup solution, it’s essential to check they’re conducting regular testing. While this might seem like a given, we’ve heard stories about IT providers who couldn’t do a disaster recovery test to check whether backups were usable because it would be too disruptive. At Perth Support this isn’t something you need to worry about – we proudly test all our clients’ backups, booting up their servers from backup images daily!
How the Perth Support Team Can Help
As your local MSP, our team can provide managed backups and peace of mind. We take away complexity with a complete solution that:
- Automates the process
- Provides daily monitoring
- Regularly tests backup recovery
We also tailor this to your business requirements, from data size to compliance and retention periods. This ensures you can be confident in your backups, and that there’s minimal downtime if you experience a data loss incident. Of course, we combine this with our commitment to responsive and reliable services and local and personable support.
To get started, reach out here and we’ll be in touch to discuss a robust data backup solution you can rely on.
