Threats to Your Data Come From All Sides

Just over a third (36 percent) of businesses don’t back up business data at all, and apparently this number isn’t keeping some IT providers up at night (not the case for us). Your businesses’ data is precious, irreplaceable, and extremely expensive to lose. Let’s talk about how delicate and dangerous it is to not have it backed up.

Hard Drives are Extremely Fragile

The device inside your computer or server that holds your data is easily the most sensitive and breakable component. Traditional mechanical hard drives work by spinning a spindle of platters at extremely high speeds. These platters have a thin magnetic coating that stores your data. A tiny arm rests over the platter with nothing but a cushion of air holding it in place. The spinning of the platter keeps the magnetic head on this arm from touching the platter. If the head were to touch the platter while it is spinning, it would decimate your data.

Modern drives have plenty of safeguards to prevent issues, but like any mechanical device, wear and tear will happen, and outside forces like bumps and shocks can shorten the reliability of a drive. If your data is confined to one drive, it just takes one bad day to lose it all, and recovering the data could be impossible.

Users Make Mistakes

Let’s say your company uses a Word document as a template for your sales proposals. Your sales team knows to make a copy of it, drop it in the client’s folder, and edit it from there. That is, until someone makes the mistake of editing the original copy and saves over the file after making major edits to it. Now someone needs to scramble to restore the file by hand. If it were backed up, you could simply restore the file from your backup.

Ransomware is Evil

Everyone knows they need to protect their computer with antivirus, but there are threats out there that can penetrate commercial antivirus solutions. One of the most common is ransomware, like Cryptolocker and Cryptowall. Both work in a similar fashion, commandeering your PC and locking your files from you unless you fork over cash. They can even infect other computers on your network and external storage devices, which could include your backup depending on your setup. Storing an off-site backup is critical for preventing this.

Is Anyone Checking Your Backup?

If your IT company set up a backup solution, is it being tested and maintained? If you don’t have an agreement or aren’t getting a bill for it, the answer is probably not. Just like any computer, things can go wrong with your backup solution. Backups should be tested and evaluated regularly, or else you might find yourself out of luck in the event of an emergency.

Our powerful backup and disaster recovery solution can be just what you are looking for to protect your business from the myriad of threats out there. Call Directive’s certified technicians today at 607.433.2200 to learn more.