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For most business owners, running your business is like taking care of a baby. The utmost importance is taken care to each small step and many owners rank their business as one of the most important things in their life.
While businesses are so important to many, they leave themselves open to a ton of risk when it comes to data loss and what might happen to their business if there data is not backed up on a regular basis.
Business continuity planning is a big deal that many business owners underestimate.
Today, just to go over some of these facts, we’re bringing you the 6 reasons why you should be running regular backups; the livelihood of your business is at stake!
- Massive Cost
The biggest reason any business should want to back up their data on a regular basis is the cost it takes to restore a lot of this network data.
There are a lot of stats between businesses across the world and small businesses. It doesn’t really matter what category that your business falls under, losing data and needing to do extensive work to get your business up and running again can cost you a lot respectively.
Up to a third of businesses that are victims of network attacks can lose revenue directly related to that attack, and almost a half of those businesses lose a significant chunk of total revenue – around 20%.
Over time, these incidents of data loss are adding up. In the past couple of years alone, businesses across the world have reported 4 times as many incidents of data loss which has led to trillions of dollars in losses. While your individual impact certainly won’t be that big, it is a silly thing to risk your livelihood on and your business should be well-protected in case something happens.
- Computer Crashes
What could happen, you say? Well, computers are wonderful things. Technology has changed the world we live in and created some amazing advancements for our society as a whole.
However, anyone who has a computer screen freeze, a phone that randomly turns off, or any other piece of glitchy technology out in the real world knows, things don’t always work the way they’re supposed to.
While it’d be great if things always worked the way they’re supposed to, that’s not always the case. Computers as magnificent as they are, are not perfect.
These crashes seem to pop up when you least expect it, however that’s not the biggest problem. If you only start to think about the effects of a crash, after a crash, then you’re going to lose a ton of data that could have easily been saved with some pre-planning.
Depending on what industry your business is in, these crashes can have different effects, but it’s never really a positive. Even things like a hard drive failure can take documents, sales, sheets, tax information, customer information. It can be a giant headache and the worst part is that a computer crash is something most never even see coming.
- Viruses and Malware
Some business owners like to believe that if they simply stay away from those Nigerian emails that they’ll never be the target of any kind of virus or malware.
In today’s online environment, that’s simply not true. It’s just too hard to predict the risk and where a virus could even be coming from.
Just because you have a level of protection doesn’t mean you’re safe from a virus attack, and when that happens – the effects are the same as any other crash or data loss, it will be expensive to your business.
- Physical Damage
When business owners think about physical damage, they tend to think about laptops and some incidental damage to computers like that.
While it’s true, laptops and smaller computers are more susceptible to damage like spilled drinks or drops to a hard floor, that’s not the only kind of physical damage that occurs.
Most laptops tend to be backed up on some level anyway, usually through cloud technology.
There is a more sinister version of physical damage that most business owners fail to think about, and that’s damage to a server or a hard drive of a physical computer.
Usually, the most common type of physical damage relates to a natural disaster in some way. The easiest way to describe this would be a fire to an office building or an earthquake to the area where your servers are stored. Is this kind of thing extremely rare? Yes, but that’s why insurance exists in the world and you can think of regular backups as insurance in the computer data world.
If a natural disaster were to occur in your area and affect a brick-and-mortar component of your business as well, these problems would simply start to stack up.
- Theft
This is similar to physical damage or a virus, but occurs due to an intended nature by a third party.
It’d be great to say we live in a world full of people with good morals, but that isn’t the case. Business data can be the target of hackers, or in large businesses, sometimes employees themselves can act in ill will.
Please keep in mind that wherever you’re sending your backup data to, if someone has access to both places, that’s just as bad as them having access to one point.
- User Error
User error is simple but can have extremely bad outcomes for a business. Have you ever been typing a paper or document when you lose power and forgot to save?
Have you ever overwritten a file that you needed, simply by mis-clicking?
It happens more often than you’d think, and “being careful” isn’t the answer here. You need to have back up data for anything that’s too important to simply be deleted by accident.
Wrap Up
All kinds of incidents can cause data loss in your business. With how important your business is to you, it’s important to protect yourself from everything out there like viruses, natural disasters, and simple user or computer error.
