BackUps and Recovery

Most people will by now have navigated the first month of lockdown and be working successfully from home. Your business may have moved to the cloud before COVID-19, or moved more recently. Many will still be working remotely on servers and devices with the data stored locally.

Wherever you are working and however you store your data, here are 5 key reasons to be taking BackUps and Recovery seriously.

1. Simple Recovery

People are not perfect - they can make mistakes. Emails containing viruses are accidentally opened every day and important files are often mistakenly deleted.

2. Audits, Taxes, and Archive

Many, if not most businesses are required to keep business records for an extended period. This is either for tax purposes or because of various regulations. The HMRC and regulatory commissions don’t care that you had a data disaster. All it means to them is that you’re not compliant and they can fine you.

3. Time is Money

Imagine you had to go back two days and do all the work again. Would you know what to do? Perhaps you have discarded the information you used to do the work in the first place. Do you even have a predictable start point to go back to? When exactly did your last good BackUp run? What had you finished and what had you not started when it completed?

4. System BackUps

It is not enough to just BackUp your files. What would you do if an entire system was destroyed and you had to rebuild it from scratch? Would you know where to begin? Fires, theft, and flood happen more often than you think.

5. Deadly Downtime

Imagine you had a complete loss of data – what do you think the impact would be? Here are some thought-provoking statistics:

• 94% of companies that experience severe data loss do not recover, 51% of these companies close within two years of the data loss, 43% of these companies do not reopen.
• 70% of small firms go out of business within a year of a large data loss incident. 

There is a common misconception that being “in the cloud” means you don’t need backups anymore. Sadly, this isn’t correct, and many cloud application suites simply don’t provide you with guaranteed BackUp and Recovery as part of the basic package. If you haven’t moved to the cloud you are probably still having to get physical copies of data off-site to protect it, which is not easy at present. Also remember, a backup is only good if it can be restored. Testing recovery should be an integral part of your Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity Planning.

Ask your maintainer:

• Whether your chosen application suite gives you the right amount of protection.
• To review your BackUp process and make sure it's fit for purpose.
• If there is a better solution out there for you.