Data backup and recovery? BORING. Crippling incident that costs my business a ton of money, time, and reputation? Less boring. Frightening, but less boring.
Regular and effective data backup and recovery procedures ought to be fundamental maintenance for all businesses. Yet, some surveys show 1 in 5 SMB owners don’t have a plan for data backup or disaster recovery. Also notable from that survey is how decision-makers define data and data backup differently, so it is possible that more than that 20% are not aware of effective data backup practices.
Of course, data loss affects business of all sizes. One of the defining stories of data loss revolves around the Pixar film Toy Story 2. Some poor sap deleted 90% of the film by entering an accidental command, and the film’s backup hadn’t gone through now-standard procedures to make sure it was working. Luckily, a Supervising Technical Director who had been on maternity leave just so happened to have a functional (though two-week-old) version of the film, and thus Toy Story 2 survived.
A myriad of reasons make data backup necessary. We’ve discussed cyberattacks on this blog, and while cyberattacks are a common cause of data loss, there are other, simpler reasons that businesses experience data loss. Most common is human error, just as in the Toy Story 2 example above – accidentally deleting files/folders, moving files/folders, or failed or bungled migrations. As you can imagine, some of these are easy to fix, but many of these accidental errors may go unnoticed initially, making recovery far more difficult.
In addition to cyberattacks and human error, physical system failure can also result in data loss. Your Managed Service Provider should be providing you with a roadmap that culls outdated hardware. Most of us yearn for the good ol’ days of American manufacturing when we could pass down an heirloom 45-year-old GE toaster to our grandchildren. But that ain’t reality, and it’s not a wise approach to your business’s IT hardware infrastructure.
Physical system failure can also be a result of natural disasters. In the CSRA, we are familiar with hurricanes, lovely ice storms, and the patented Southern thunderstorms. These events can cause issues like flooding and power outages which can harm your network’s infrastructure.
The good news is that regular data backup mitigates some of the risks associated with data loss. An MSP like BIT Services has tools that can automate much of this task while still exercising human oversight over the backup process. Each morning, our techs examine our clients’ backup processes to make sure everything is in order. Increasingly, cybercriminals target backup data servers first so that data recovery is not possible for the business owner, so it is important that your business backs up in a secure manner that actually allows you to recover your data when an emergency happens.
In the end, data backup and recovery sounds like a boring topic, but please, in this case, choose the boring story. Make sure your data is backed up effectively to avoid being the subject of a data loss nightmare.