In today’s increasingly advanced digital era, it is essential for companies to have a secure data backup strategy or plan—especially for data and information that are critical to business operations.
No matter how large your company is, data remains an essential asset. If you do not yet have a solid plan or strategy to ensure your company’s data is secure, there are three key realities you must immediately consider:
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Humans are prone to making mistakes.
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All computer systems can crash.
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Disasters can happen at any time—even when you are prepared.
If any of the events above occur, it is crucial that your data has already been backed up and is ready to be restored. Below is our explanation of why data backup is so important for companies.
Why Are Data Backup and Recovery Facilities So Important?
Data loss can happen in many ways. Just because you have been fortunate enough not to lose critical digital assets in the past does not mean it will not happen in the future. Common causes of data loss include human error, internal misuse, theft by competitors, hardware failure, and more. Not to mention disasters that can occur at any time—such as floods, fires, or even something as simple as a spilled cup of coffee.
Unfortunately, company executives sometimes still believe it is sufficient to store important data in a single location and underestimate the importance of data backups. Below are six reasons why your company needs a proper data backup and recovery strategy.
Technology Failure
Over the past 15 years, we have witnessed major changes in technology usage, such as companies moving toward paperless operations. Important documents are now commonly stored locally on computer hard drives.
What is the risk? Hardware can fail, devices can be infected by viruses or ransomware, or laptops may suddenly stop working entirely. If your company relies heavily on data, this scenario can be disastrous.
Human Error
Even though every employer hopes for perfect employees, they are still human. That means mistakes are inevitable—making data backup and recovery critical. Backup systems help minimize and mitigate the impact of human error.
Employees may unintentionally skip an important step in a process, input incorrect data, or accidentally delete important files. While quality assurance is important, having online data backups is equally essential.
Disaster and Competition Factors
Natural Disasters
No one can predict how nature behaves. Natural disasters can occur at any time and pose a major threat to a company’s IT infrastructure.
Extreme temperatures, floods, earthquakes, storms, power outages, and fires can all disrupt business operations. However, companies with backup solutions do not need to worry excessively about such damage. They can easily retrieve critical information from cloud storage and continue business operations as usual. Using cloud disaster recovery services ensures company data remains safe even during catastrophic events.
Competitive Advantage
When you have a well-defined data backup and recovery strategy, you automatically gain an advantage over competitors who do not. A solid backup plan enhances your company’s credibility in the eyes of customers and potential clients.
A well-known example is TalkTalk, which lost £60 million in 2015 due to a cyberattack and subsequently lost 101,000 customers. More than 156,000 records containing customers’ personal information were compromised.
Cyberattacks remain a major threat to businesses. When a company is breached, customer trust diminishes—not only from customers, but also from employees, investors, partners, and prospective clients.
Theft and Future Readiness
Data Theft
A U.S.-based company, Biscom, found that 85% of employees admitted to stealing company information or documents they had created themselves. If terminated, many acknowledged they would share the data with competitors out of resentment.
When employees steal data, it can severely damage your business. Without a backup strategy, such data may be permanently lost from your company’s systems.
Preparing for the Future
Companies that fail to modernize will inevitably fall behind their competitors. Storing data locally and risking data loss is no longer a viable way to run a business.
Online data backups allow you and your employees to access data anytime, anywhere. This enables remote work, seamless collaboration on shared documents, and ensures data integrity.
One of the biggest challenges faced by companies that fail to upgrade their systems is corrupted or incomplete data. It is common to find multiple versions of the same document edited by different employees—each believing their version is the most accurate.
Tips for Data Backup
Regular and proactive data backups provide peace of mind in the event of unexpected incidents. Since data loss can occur at any time and in various ways, starting a backup strategy is a critical first step. However, consistency is key. If a disaster occurs and your last backup was six months ago, data recovery will be extremely difficult.
Your backup strategy should also include disaster mitigation planning. This helps restore damaged hardware as quickly as possible. Backup management should include software that automatically performs backups and restores data from multiple backup versions.
Maintaining physical backups is also highly recommended in case your cloud provider experiences downtime. Additionally, the 3-2-1 backup rule is strongly advised:
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Create 3 copies of your data
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Store them on 2 different types of media
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Keep 1 copy offsite (in the cloud)
Using cloud backup services with Veeam can be an effective and efficient solution for your company. Cloud Backup with Veeam provides offsite data protection on separate servers, ensuring your data is protected from failures on primary servers—whether due to system errors, human error, cyberattacks, or other data loss risks.
That concludes our explanation. If you would like to read more articles about technology or learn more about Indonesian Cloud products, please visit Indonesiancloud.com and our VPS website cloudhostingaja.com. See you in our next article.