Data loss happens. Sometimes by accident. Sometimes on purpose. But it doesn’t mean that your business has to be seriously affected. Just think about these three threats to your data to understand why a secure and reliable backups could help to mitigate much of the risk.
Ransomware
If you were to return to your workstation one day to find the screen flashing an ominous warning informing you that all your files had been locked and unless you pay to have them unlocked they will be permanently deleted, what choices would you have?
Pay? Ask your IT team to find a workaround? Write the data off?
You shouldn’t have to. With a reliable and complete backup of your data, a full restore would be at your fingertips.
Accidental or Malicious Deletion
The most common reason for data loss is accidental, produced through human error. We’ve all been there – we’ve inadvertently not clicked the “save” button when closing a file; lost changes through power loss or a crash. Sometimes these incidents are rectified immediately, unfortunately a number aren’t.
Worse still, disgruntled employees can have a devastating impact on your data security. By carefully deleting files and records that won’t immediately be noticed but are vital to your ongoing business success and/or regulatory compliance, they can take out their anger in destructive ways.
Given it takes an average of 5 months for missing data to be noticed, you can’t rely upon Microsoft’s retention policy (as little as 14 days). These innocent mistakes and malicious actions could cost you time and money and impact on your reputation.
With full, ongoing backups of your data, you would be able to reinstate the missing files with little fuss.
Compliance
All businesses need to hang on to historical data to meet legal requirements, even if it’s just for tax purposes or GDPR. Some businesses have more stringent demands put upon them for data compliance. Any of the three issues mentioned above could put your business in jeopardy, or at the very least be time consuming and frustrating to rectify.
How would you cope if the worst happened?
Fortunately, there are services that scale to individual company needs and can reliably backup the information you hold in Microsoft’s cloud. We partner with industry leader, AvePoint, who provide automatic backups of all the information your business holds with Office 365 and associated services.
