How Should Businesses Focus on Cloud-to-Cloud Backup Strategies?
Data has become one of the essential elements of any business in today’s time and age. Without data, a business can’t imagine its success in the long haul. Companies collect, store, and analyze the data to gain insight into new trends and customer preferences. Data opens endless possibilities for the business to grow and acquire a competitive edge in the market. Thus, companies must have unhindered access to the data. For a smooth operation of any business, it must have around-the-clock availability of data. For a long time now, companies prefer to rely on IT support companies for their data backup and recovery needs. Data backup has always been a crucial component of an IT strategy. While traditional data backup strategies comprise floppy disks, duplicate servers, or customized applications, more modern techniques include cloud backup. Cloud backups have proven to be more agile and cost-effective. While most businesses have adopted cloud computing, they assume that it’s automatically backed up since their data is stored on the cloud. However, your IT support company may beg to differ.
In this blog, we have highlighted some reasons why businesses should consider cloud-to-cloud data backup.
Cloud and Data Loss
Many businesses assume that their cloud server is backed up. While most cloud service providers have disaster recovery plans in place on their own servers, there are other ways through which a business can lose its data. Most applications are not built to safeguard the data against natural disasters, accidental deletion, or malicious attacks. If your actions cause data loss, you may experience a hard time retrieving the data unless you have a data backup strategy in place.
For any business, data loss is bad news. Statistics show that 60% of the companies that experience data loss go out of business within six months of the incident.
Some Common Reasons for Data Loss
- Accidental Deletion of Data:
Many times users delete the data only to need it later. Accidental deletion of data or files is not unheard of. One may delete the scrapped project files now only to learn later that the project has got the green light. Similarly, third-party apps or users may unknowingly corrupt or overwrite stored data.
- Over-Writing Data:
SaaS applications are built to hold a colossal amount of data. New data is constantly added, or the existing ones are updated. When extensive data are uploaded into the applications, some data may get overwritten or corrupt. This can happen when bulk data is uploaded, or third-party applications are integrated into the base SaaS application. Thus, businesses should rely on professional IT assessment services when it comes to protecting their data.
- Malicious Actions:
A business’s data can be under internal or external threats. Employees also delete data before they quit the job or when they are fired. They may do so to spite their boss or colleague. Besides this, hackers and cybercriminals breach security and steal or delete the data.
How to protect data in the cloud?
A survey commissioned by the Aberdeen Group cited that 32% of the companies surveyed experienced data loss within their SaaS application. Roughly, one in every three companies loses their data in the cloud. As more and more companies are switching towards SaaS applications, data loss incidents are also increasing. Some of the measures you can take to protect your data are:
- Implementing robust password protocols
- SaaS application training
- Adopting good data management practices
- Use of automated backups and data restoration solutions
