Why You Need to Maintain a Data Backup

With World Backup Day coming and going approximately one month ago, it hasn’t been long since we should all have been reminded of the importance of data backup. Regardless, there is never a bad time to discuss the harsh realities of business data loss, and how businesses can avoid it.

The Causes of Data Loss

When approximately seven out of ten companies experience data loss, it pays to pay attention to the root causes.

Before we get into the numbers, do you have any predictions? What percentage of data would you estimate is lost during a natural disaster, for example? How much would you expect human error to come into play?

You might be surprised to learn how common it is for some data loss causes to impact companies, while others are far more rare than many would expect. For example, natural disasters only account for approximately one percent of lost data in total. Comparatively, hardware failure or other system malfunctions lead to 78 percent of data loss events.

How Perception Influences Data Loss

Surprised? Many company decision makers likely would be. The knee-jerk reaction might be to focus the majority of a business’ efforts on preventing external causes of data loss in the first place. However, like we just went over, these are responsible for a minimal number of data loss events - it is far more common for hardware to fail or for a user to make a mistake than for a disaster event to strike your place of operations.

Then we have to ask ourselves if it really matters.

Other consequences of a given disaster (property damage and the like) notwithstanding, data loss is pretty much just data loss. You have your valuable data, and suddenly, you don’t. At that point, the end result overwhelms the factors that led to it.

Make no mistake: before you lose your data, these factors are crucial to know. How else will you be able to avoid losing your data in the first place?

The real value of a data backup lies in its being there when you need it, regardless of why that might be.

Ensuring Your Backup Will Be There

Of course, there’s backing up your data, and then there’s having a data backup. What’s the difference? In a word, reliability.

There are plenty of means of backing up data. USB flash drives, for instance, can be used to save a copy of your data… but so can the cloud, and the cloud is a lot harder to lose.

It should come as no surprise, then, to find out that we always recommend that your business’ backups are kept in the cloud. Not only are they accessible there, they are also protected from any data-loss-inducing events that may strike your location.

For more information about how to prepare a backup for your business, reach out to our professionals! Call 607.433.2200 today.