Your organization’s data and documents directly correlate with your day to day operations and productivity. If anything happened to your organization that resulted in a loss of data, what impact would it have on your employees and clients? It could certainly result in downtime and lost revenue. To prevent data loss, there are 5 key practices to consider when thinking about the backup solution for your business.
1. Have a backup plan
It sounds basic. Every business needs a backup solution in place to prevent file and data loss. The problem is that businesses aren’t doing this until it is too late. A recent study found that 58% of small businesses are not prepared for a data loss incident. At the same time, in the event of an incident, 60% of businesses were never able to recover lost files.
Organizations can lose the data and files it needs in many different ways. Whether it comes from cyber attacks, natural disasters or human error, lost data causes downtime and affects productivity.
It doesn’t matter how many employees you have or what industry you operate in, every organization should have an integrated backup strategy in place. Be proactive and protect your organization’s data.
2. Automate it
When thinking about an integrated backup strategy, you have to consider how data and files are going to get to the backup destination. In the past, employees manually saved their important files to a server or network drive once they had finished. Industry best practice is to save all files, including “work in progress” files, to the backup destination every 15 minutes. Imagine having each employee in your organization stop their work 32 times a day to save their files. This would have a very high impact on productivity!
Leading backup solutions will back up your files automatically and silently every 15 minutes. This protects you from human error and reassures everyone that files and data are backing up on a regular basis throughout the day.
3. Back up data from endpoints
Employees typically spend most of their time doing work on their desktop or laptops. They typically only move files into a central file destination once they finish their work. It was found that 60% of business files are stored solely on employee’s desktops and laptops. If your backup plan does not back up data starting at employee laptops and desktops you run the risk of losing all your “work in progress” files. These often have brainstorming ideas and are the start of valuable files.
Unfortunately, 58% of small businesses don’t back up endpoints. This is a large vulnerability that you can avoid with any modern integrated backup strategy. The approach of backing up files directly from all endpoints secures all data and files, no matter what stage of completion.
4. Cloud Sharing Apps are not a backup solution
Two growing workplace trends are the use of cloud technology and cloud sharing apps. It’s important to understand that cloud sharing apps like Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive are not automatic cloud backup apps. These apps allow for teams to easily collaborate and share files, but they are not backup apps.
When using these sharing apps, one person’s actions will affect everyone else. If someone accidentally edits or deletes a file, it becomes a problem for others. Sharing apps rely on manual employee actions, meaning that employees choose which files they want to selectively add, edit or delete. As previously mentioned, employees typically only add files to the cloud share once they’re ready to be looked at, which means that there’s no backup of the document while they’re working on it on their desktop or laptop.
Cloud sharing apps are an effective way to share and collaborate on files, and it is also important to have a backup solution in place.
5. Keep one backup offsite
An offsite backup solution stores your business data in a remote data centre. One benefit of doing this is that it keeps your data safe from cyberattacks. Cyberattacks are on the rise, with attackers targeting organizations of all sizes. It’s important to keep one copy of your data protected and secure offsite in a Canadian based data centre. This way, a copy of all of your data is there in case you need to recover anything that was lost in a cyberattack.
Another benefit of storing data offsite is that you have a copy available if the primary site is damaged. Although uncommon, natural disasters do happen. If there’s a fire, flood or robbery in your workplace, your data could be in jeopardy. Storing files in only one physical location leaves you vulnerable, whereas keeping your backup solution offsite provides peace of mind and security to your organization.
If you have questions or would like more information on integrated backup solutions for your business, connect with one of our team members.