Today, more and more businesses need to be nimble when it comes to responding to ever-increasing online threats such as cyber threats including but not limited to ransomware, hackers, viruses, and malware.
In such a scenario, it becomes essential for businesses to have a robust backup and restore strategy to minimize downtime. In case you haven’t already got an appropriate backup and restore strategy in place for your business, here are 5 use-case scenarios where a backup can save you.
1) Recovering from data sabotage by an insider
You may have a disgruntled employee on board who deliberately decides to sabotage data. He can do that by inserting bogus or inaccurate data in your databases. Or even by entering malicious code in your data to achieve the objective of spreading malware throughout your systems. According to a 2020 report by Ponemon Institute, the total average cost of insider-related incidents is $11.45M, and there is no guarantee that you won’t become the next statistic!
If this happens, you can quickly recover from the data sabotage by having a backup copy of your data. You should try to have multiple sets of data backup taken at different time increments. It’s possible to achieve this by enforcing a daily backup routine and store a week’s work of backups. By doing so, you have the ability to restore data from up to a week ago if more recent backups have damaged information.
2) Protecting yourself from data loss
Data losses can take place due to computer crashes, accidental deletion of files, natural disasters, or cyber-attacks. Data that you could lose could be in the form of spreadsheets, contracts, legal documents, or a list of business contacts. Whatever be the data, it is important to regularly backup these files to be able to recover from permanent data losses. With a well-defined backup policy, you can quickly roll back lost data and keep your business running.
3) Maintaining business continuity
Today’s customer expects 24×7 access to businesses. If you are not able to promptly service customer requests, be they sales or service requests, you may face irate customers at best and lose out to your competition at the worst. In such a scenario, it is critical for you to be able to maintain business continuity even in adverse situations.
One way to do this is to implement remote cloud storage solutions that let you easily access files that facilitate your business operations and help mitigate extended downtime. Implementing Microsoft DFS file sharing is an elegant way of doing this as you can leverage private cloud storage as a central cloud file repository with file change history, audit tracing, and version control to ensure business continuity for your organization.
4) Facing regular audits confidently
Today, a lot of businesses require audits either from 3rd party auditors or prospective clients who may need to carry out preliminary audits before entering into a business relationship with you. You should have a strategy that backs up your relevant data regularly. These data backups can be then provided to auditors or customers to go through and vet your business operations as per their requirements. Keeping regular backups that are readily accessible to auditors and potential customers or potential partners will give you the confidence to be able to face such audit requests successfully.
In summary
In the near future, you can expect that your company will need to handle a vast amount of data. Hence, it is important to have a well-defined data backup strategy that will help you scale your business and also protect you from data loss.
Samantha Acuna is a writer based in San Francisco, CA. Her work has been featured in The Huffington Post, Entrepreneur.com, and Yahoo Small Business.
