Two words struck massive fear in 2017: Wanna Cry? This digital invasion was a form of software called ransomware. The idea was to encrypt (scramble) up files and request money to fix them. Events like this have cost companies massive amounts of lost time, productivity, and sanity. Poor souls struck with this burden had a bigger picture to examine. Should they simply pay the extortion and risk future extortion? Or should they rely on backups to save them?
The obvious solution to every company is “rely on backups”. For many, that’s a separate difficult burden. Good backups rely on:
- Precision
- The correct data needs to be backed up on a regular occasion, so as to avoid having to recreate valuable information. However, simply “backing up everything” can be quite costly when speaking of redundant hardware to host the information.
- Security
- One of the biggest threats to a company is internal theft. Unsecured backups on thumb drives and external drives can be taken by the wrong person. For example, if a staff member’s car is stolen, they may have backup information sitting in their laptop case. Beyond the internal loss of data, that can put customer information at risk. Losing customer trust, because of stolen data, can impact a business’s reputation beyond repair.
- Verifiable
- Backups are worthless if you can’t restore. That means that regular drills need to occur to verify that backups are working as expected. That takes time and energy, especially if the backup is quite sizable or in a tricky format.
Enter the solution: Cloud Computing! By putting information in the cloud, the redundant and complex hardware is left to the experts. The scale of cloud computing often reduces the cost to store information. Internal security is a breeze as there are no “forgotten drives” laying around. Finally, restoring backups is also exceedingly easy and can be done on a regular basis.
Each backup solution is best when tailored for the individual business. To learn more about how to tailor your backups, please contact us.
