Your Business Needs to Have a Data Backup

With World Backup Day occurring one month ago, it hasn’t been long since we should all have been reminded of the critical value of data backup. Nevertheless, there is never a bad time to discuss the harsh realities of business data loss, and how businesses can circumvent it.

The Causes of Data Loss

When approximately seven out of ten companies experience data loss, it's time to take a look at the root causes.

Before we dive into the numbers, do you have any predictions? What percentage of data would you estimate is lost during a natural disaster? How much would you expect human error to play a factor?

You may be surprised to learn how common it is for some data loss causes to impact businesses, while others are far more rare than many would expect. For example: natural disasters only account for approximately one percent of lost data in total. Comparatively, hardware failure or other system malfunctions lead to 78 percent of data loss events.

How Perception Influences Data Loss

Shocked? Many business decision makers likely would be. The knee-jerk reaction might be to focus the majority of an organization's efforts on preventing external causes of data loss in the first place. Nevertheless, these are responsible for a minimal number of data loss events; it is far more common for hardware to fail or for a user to make a mistake than for a disaster event to strike your company.

Then we have to ask ourselves if it really matters.

Other consequences of a given disaster (property damage and the like) notwithstanding, data loss is essentially just data loss. You have your valuable data, and then you don’t. At that point, the end result overwhelms the factors that led to it.

Make no mistake: before you lose your data, these factors are imperative to know. How else will you be able to avoid losing your data in the first place?

The real value of a data backup lies in its being there when you need it, regardless of why that might be.

Ensuring Your Backup Will Be There

Naturally, there’s backing up your data, and then there’s having a data backup. What’s the difference? Reliability.

There are many ways of backing up data. For example: USB flash drives can be used to save a copy of your data… but so can the cloud, and the cloud is a lot harder to lose.

It should come as no surprise, then, to find out that we always recommend that your organization's backups are stored in the cloud. Not only are they accessible there, they are also protected from any data-loss-inducing events that may strike your location.

For more information about how to prepare a backup for your company, reach out to our professionals! Call Macro Systems at 703-359-9211 today.