Hopefully you have taken some precautions to secure your business data, such as backing it up in some form or fashion. But depending on how you do that, it might not always be enough.
It’s often assumed that by backing up your data once a day and leaving it at that, you’ve taken a sufficient enough step. But these days that just isn’t sufficient enough, for a number of reasons:
• If you normally perform the backup manually and forget to perform the backup, or the backup process fails, you’re not protected.
• If you only back up your files once a day and you suffer a major issue before the backup happens, then you could lose an entire day’s work.
• If you don’t routinely validate your backup files, you have no way of knowing when the backups may partially or completely fail until it’s too late.
• If you store the backed-up data on-site and then have a site-specific disaster, you could lose the backup data as well as your property.
• If you don’t back-up all your application and server configuration files along with your data, it could take much longer to restore your data because you will have to rebuild your servers and reload operating systems and applications.
Proper data backup can help mitigate the damage should a disaster ever befall your business, but one thing it won’t do is shield you from damaged or lost client relationships. There is an implicit trust between you and your customers. While they might sympathize with a business-damaging issue, they won’t sympathize if the data they trust you with is lost or stolen. Ultimately, your reputation isn’t something for which you can be compensated. There is no backup for that.
Data backups are an integral part of business continuity and disaster recovery plan, but are only effective if they are handled properly.
For more information on data backups an other network security solutions, please contact us.