Data Backup & Cybersecurity

In this era, data is the currency that rules the world. Data protection and cyber security are ongoing and important challenges for organizations of all sizes. With the threat landscape continually changing and expanding, especially for small and medium businesses (SMBs), knowledge and awareness are the first steps in preventing data loss.

Losing any amount of data can compromise your personal identity, erase your family history, and even bankrupt your entire company. This is where data backup comes into the picture.

Having reliable backups is one of the most important controls that a company can have to prevent long term damage following a data breach.

Some Staggering Facts

More than 50% of the ransomware attacks include data thefts. Some numbing facts around ransomware are as under :

Loss of Business Revenue: Following a ransomware assault, 66% of businesses reported considerable revenue loss.

Increasing Ransom Demands: The majority of corporations who paid a ransom paid between $350,000 and $1.4 million, with only 7% paying more than $1.4 million.

Brand and Reputation Damage: A successful cyber-assault is said to have harmed the brand and reputation of 53% of firms.

Employee Layoffs: 29 percent reported being forced to layoff employees due to financial pressures following a ransomware attack.

Business Closures: 26 percent of organizations reported that a ransomware attack forced the business to close for some period.

What is Data Backup?

In layman’s language, Data backup is the practice of copying data from a primary to a secondary location, to protect it in case of a disaster, accident or malicious action.

Large volumes of data are collected and produced by businesses nowadays. Whether we’re talking about consumer data, employee data, or system data, losing any of it can be crippling to a company.

Data security is an important feature of business continuity, and data backups are an important part of that process. Data backups ensure that regardless of what happens to your data, you have a complete duplicate of your systems ready to restore.

Investing in Data Backup & Recovery

Due to the multitude of security vulnerabilities in our systems and software, as well as the expanded attack surface brought on by digital transformation and remote employees, preventing hackers from striking with ransomware is nearly difficult.

A ransomware attack will frequently both encrypt and take a copy of an organization’s data. Short of paying the ransom, the best option for a firm is to keep a safe backup of its data for recovery. Furthermore, if the company encrypts all of its data, including copies, the stolen copy will be worthless.

Data backup and recovery solutions have been around for a long time and have grown to provide the powerful data protection and recovery capabilities required to recover data and restore services to their original form.

The “3-2-1 backup rule” is a time-honored strategy for data protection that states that a business should have at least three copies of its data, on two different storage media types, with one of the copies offsite or in the cloud.

Without backups for recovery and an offsite copy that ransomware cannot reach, the only recourse is to pay a ransom to get the data back. The financial loss will hurt, but the reputational loss may be even greater.

Data Backup Tips for Businesses

Simple : The data backup solution you choose should be easy to set up and use for the least technically inclined person on your team. The fewer steps it takes to recover your data, the better.

Capacity : How much data do you need to back up? Most backup solutions include a cloud storage vault for your backups. However, if you exceed your storage allocation, you may be liable for additional fees. Ensure you can set up notifications to help you manage your storage capacity.

Automated : Most small businesses don’t have an in-house IT team to manage backup processes. Ideally, you’ll want a solution that runs automatically, so you don’t have to worry about it.

Flexible : You should be able to configure your backups to run at intervals that make sense to your business model. A high-volume ecommerce store needs continuous backups, while a consultancy might not need that level of frequency.

Disaster Recovery : If your backup provider’s servers are destroyed in a fire, flood, or for any other reason, how will you access your backups? Be sure you know what your backup vendor’s disaster recovery plan (DRP) entails.

Final Verdict

The basic lesson is that, given the threat’s development, disregarding the possibility of a ransomware occurrence signaling a reportable breach is a risky assumption. Furthermore, given the threat of data theft, it is prudent to invest in cybersecurity and data backup best practices.

For more information on the topic, join us for an insightful webinar on 31 March 2022 at 11 AM EST. Click here to register