Data Loss and Recovery Are An Increasing Concern For Business Owners

Protecting your business data is critical. Data backup and recovery are essential parts of running a business.  Every business owner should understand these three things:

• Everyone is capable of making errors,
• Every computer system is capable of crashing, and
• Disasters can happen when you don’t expect them to.

With all of the recent industry focus on data loss and disaster recovery, these statistics aren’t surprising:

• 53% of businesses have experienced data loss within the past 12 months, increasing 31% during the prior year.
• 24% of IT managers avoid telling their Chief Information Officers that some of their data isn’t backed up, such as data on mobile devices.
• 38% of IT managers worry about how secure and effective their backup solutions actually are.
• 58% of downtime and data loss was caused by storage problems or failures.
• 60% of companies have identified the most common cause of downtime as human error.
• 86% of companies have experienced unplanned downtime within the last year.

It’s essential that business owners and managers understand the potential risks to their data and systems, and have reasonable solutions in place, regardless of whether they’re running systems in-house or in the cloud.

By focusing on a solution that addresses only hardware and software errors, you could be forgetting to protect your business from user mistakes. While an efficient cloud infrastructure will provide protection from hardware and/or software failures, your data is still susceptible to user error.

Establish a Backup Plan

Data loss can be costly and disastrous; whether it’s caused by hardware failure, human error, theft, or a computer virus. Establishing a backup plan is key to your business-data protection strategy in case your original data is damaged or lost.

Often times, the backup is stored offsite to protect against a natural disaster, and updated frequently as it should be. Updates can be done daily or quarterly, depending on your particular type of business operations.

It’s also important to conduct periodic testing of the data, in order to ensure it’s accurate and viewable. This will help prevent data loss in case the backup becomes corrupted. In addition, it’s recommended for companies to have a third backup somewhere else, which can be done via a trusted online cloud service.