6 Reasons Why Data Backup and Recovery Is Essential for Your Business

Backing up data entails creating a copy of your business’s essential information and storing it at an offsite location so that it can come in handy when the original version is lost, stolen, or corrupted.

For a company, building and collating proprietary data and information takes a lot of time and hard work. Your business could’ve been fortunate enough to avoid information loss in the past. Keep in mind, though, your luck may not hold for too long. 

In this blog, we cover six reasons why data backup and recovery is crucial for your business. 

1. Failure of technology

Over the past 15 years, almost all modern businesses have gone paperless due to massive changes in technology worldwide. This means essential documents including information that gives your business a competitive advantage plus other important documents, are stored locally on computers. 

Unfortunately, all equipment eventually malfunctions in one way or the other. Your laptop can crash, power surges disrupt hard drives, desktops may get infected with ransomware. It’s always beneficial to be safe just in case your business is subjected to such misfortune. The last thing you’d want to face would be telling a customer that their service will be stopped for a while. 

2. Human errors

Human errors are inevitable, and therefore it’s of paramount importance to have a data backup solution in place to make corrections. If left uncorrected, it may lead to loss of profits and even lawsuits in the worst case. 

These errors can be due to transcription and transposition errors, data misinterpretation, hiring insufficient staff, and much more. In such a case, you must take a hard look at how you treat your data and implement a data quality program at the earliest. Alongside that, a data backup plan is equally, if not more important. Always remember, your data quality may end up becoming the differentiating factor between a successful and unsuccessful business. 

3. Mother nature strikes

Picture this. Your local area has been hit by a violent thunderstorm that’s hurling vehicles, uprooting trees, and destroying buildings in its wake. Once the storm tides over, you head back to your office and try to resume operations. You’re in trouble, my friend, because most likely, power surges have burnt out all your computers, making them worthless. 

What you needed was a data backup and recovery plan to keep all your data intact. This would’ve let you locate all your essential documents from the storage on the cloud. 

4. Competitive advantage

Data is undoubtedly the most crucial asset in any organization because it ensures an advantage over your competition. Data breaches have cost large fortune 500 companies a fortune, let alone small to medium-sized companies.

Big brands like Facebook, Uber, Cocacola and even tech giants like Google (52.5 million users affected in the breach) have been victims of data breaches and leakages. Banks and financial institutions are at high risk and need to be at the forefront when it comes to embracing advanced technologies.

These breaches negatively impact the business, reducing trust and weakening customer relationships along the way. Plus, confidence in staff, investors, and potential customers falter. Customers want to share their data only with credible companies with a solid data backup and recovery plan. 

5. Corporate theft on the rise

Increasingly today, when workers quit their jobs, they not only take their paycheck along with them, but they also take company data like customer lists, patent applications, and source code. Corporate theft takes place now more than ever, with a 40% increase in data exposure events. 

Removable media like USB drives are most commonly used to steal company data. The number one indicator that data may be stolen is when employees are either fired or laid off. 30% of staff admit that they took information not created by them. While 20% would take data due to the anger, they’d experience and also pass it off to the competition if they were fired. All this data theft is just hurting your business, and if you don’t have a decent data recovery plan, you may lose the data forever. 

6. Embracing the future

Even after knowing that data backup plans are the best way to protect your company, one-third of businesses today have a complacent approach to this practice, failing to embrace future advancements. 

With a backup service in place, you and your team can access data irrespective of the time and place. So when it comes to working remotely (like during the Covid-19 pandemic), collaboration on the same task is easier and more effective. Moreover, the integrity of the data remains unharmed. 

Businesses that have failed to upgrade their systems run the risk of storing corrupted and incomplete data, not to mention plenty edited versions of the same document. In the long run, this leads to confusion as to which document is the most relevant. To put it simply, this is no way to run a business.