Data loss is one of the single biggest threats facing businesses today. Your business and client data is the lifeblood of your business and is of great value to you. In today’s age of cybercriminals, this value makes it vulnerable. It becomes a target of hackers and online miscreants, eager to capture it and exploit your company for whatever they can using ransomware, spyware and malware.
And it’s not just cybersecurity you need to worry about. Human error within your organisation can cause massive data wipeouts. Natural disasters like fires and floods can wipe out business premises and all the data therein. Premises can be moved, but data can’t be recreated.
Brisbane businesses need to have backup strategies in place that safeguard their data, minimise disruptions to operations and ensure continuity. Consider some of these statistics:
– 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster, filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster.
– 50% of businesses without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately.
– 30% of all businesses that have a major fire go out of business within a year and 70% fail within five years.
A solid backup system will help your business avoid becoming an unwanted statistic. Here are some of the reasons why this will benefit you.
Dodge Downtime by Backing up Your Data
You lose your business data and there’s going to be a period of instability while you try get back on your feet and get the ball rolling. Downtime is an absolute killer for businesses of all sizes. Having your data backed up and easily recoverable decreases expensive downtime, allowing you to save revenue and get back to normal operations swiftly.
Avoid Doing Work Twice
When you do something, you do your best to do it right the first time. If you lose everything in a data crash and have to rewrite processes, setup systems and recreate all your old work, it’s going to take a long time before it’s at the high standard it was at. Some aspects of your work setup will be lost forever. Can your business even survive having to re-do all your past work? Most won’t be able to.
Gain the Competitive Advantage
Imagine situations where multiple businesses suffer data loss, such as in the case of a natural disaster. If you recover quickly and are the first to open your doors, you will gain yourself new customers who have nowhere else to go because the other businesses are still closed. Not only is this giving you a valuable advantage over other business, you could be really helping desperate customers with nowhere else to go.
Use Your Quick Recovery as a Selling Point
A quick recovery post data-loss is a marketing opportunity for your organisation. Don’t hide the incident, rather let your customers know about it and illustrate how it didn’t affect your ability to serve them. Try and get a testimonial from clients up on your website or social media attesting to your quick recovery.
Brand Reputation
Any kind of data loss is going to have negative connotations for your business. Consumer trust is compromised, and your organisational compliance is called into question. The value of your brand in the eyes of consumers diminishes. A proactive response to a data breach can minimise this. If an organisation has a crisis management plan in place and takes fast and appropriate action to recover data, communicating clearly with stakeholders the entire time, reputational damage can be avoided.
Don’t Lose Customers
According to Acronis, “more than 20 percent of businesses that experience data loss or suffer a cyber-attack lose customers as well. And, 40 percent of those companies lose more than 20% of their customers.” That’s a lot of customers. You can mitigate this loss by having data recovery processes in place that ensure your customers aren’t negatively affected at all. If they don’t see a problem, they won’t see a need to move elsewhere.
Tax Reporting and Audits
Businesses want to keep compliant with the tax man and other regulatory bodies. You need to have years’ worth of records backed up to keep them happy in the case of an audit. Losing them in a data breach isn’t a good look… it kinda looks like you’re trying to hide something. It’s not an excuse for non-compliance, so just make sure your backups are in place.
Better Organisation of Files
When you place a priority on backing up your files, you organise them better. Your systems become decluttered and your processes more streamlined. Archives of information grow over the years, a blueprint of your company’s history that can be accessed at any time. IT leads to a more unified and categorised collection of data.
Peace of Mind
We all want to be able to stress less. Having robust backups in place that are easily accessed in case of a disaster takes away a large worry. The peace-of-mind alone makes it a worthwhile investment.
A good rule when considering your backup strategy is the 3-2-1 rule from Smile IT partners Acronis. According to this rule you should:
– Keep three copies of your data;
– Have the data stored in two different formats, eg one in the cloud and two copies on hard drives;
– Ensure one copy is offsite in case of a physical disaster.
Smile IT are here to help Brisbane businesses understand the importance of data backups and implement them successfully. If you have any questions at all, please get in touch. We’ve got a team of tech gurus that would love to help you out.
When he’s not writing tech articles or turning IT startups into established and consistent managed service providers, Peter Drummond can be found kitesurfing on the Gold Coast or hanging out with his family!