By Jon Thordarson, European Technical Support Manager at KeepItSafe
July 27, 2015

KeepItSafe Cloud Backup Expert Tips: The Consequences of Data Loss For Businesses

What if all the business data you have is suddenly wiped out one day due to a fire, system crash or a natural calamity? What will be the cost to your business? Well, while no one has an accurate estimate, everyone would say with no hesitation that the loss would be tremendous. It may even result in the enterprise ceasing to exist. The data loss will be significant not only in terms of the number of man hours that have been lost and will be lost; it will also have immense financial implications. Add to this, the loss of information.

You will no longer have any track of your customers, suppliers, stocks, order details, payment details or amounts that are payable to you from different sources. The thought of a manual reinstatement of the information will be mind-boggling. In the circumstances, it is better to be cautious rather than sorry.

One of the cost effective ways of guarding your data is to create cloud backups of your data. This can be done continuously or near continuously. Fire, floods, natural calamities or man made disasters will lose their edge if you can restore your data from your cloud backup and continue your business from another location while your data center is being rebuilt!

This is not to undermine the importance or the necessity of offline backups. However, offline backups too, are subject to a number of problems. You need to hire a separate storage vault for your offline backups. The backups have to be regular and well catalogued and stored. It will have to also be physically protected against theft and all the disasters against which you protect your data center.

Restoration of the data may demand expertise that you do not possess. All this has financial implications. Added to this is the fact that tapes, USB drives and external drives can fail for unknown reasons and your backup may be lost for ever in the coils of a magnetic tape that can no longer be read by your systems.

Cloud backup of data is a seamless process that can happen even while your data is being generated by your systems. All you need is a powerful Internet connection with sufficient bandwidth for the transmission of the data to your online data repository.

The online data repository can be located in a geographically divergent location and seismic zone. The cloud backup service provider, whose business is backup of data, will have put in place all the necessary controls for the protection of your data and the data of thousands of customers like you. The data center will be specially temperature controlled and physically protected against unauthorized access.

The cloud backup service provider would have his own disaster recovery protocols in place and will ensure that your data is backed up into several multiple online servers simultaneously or at pre-defined intervals to guard against the loss of data. Providers may use one or more geographically dispersed servers for the purpose. Some cloud backup companies also offer to backup your data on to external drives and ship it to you for a nominal cost as an additional service.

Restoration of your data in the event of data loss is also made easy by the cloud backup service vendor. 24 x 7 technical support is placed at your service for any technical queries that you may have with regard to the restoration of your data. You can restore your data to entirely new machines if your original machines have been damaged beyond repair and your data center is no longer usable. If the loss is minor and only a few files and folders have been deleted, you can restore the deleted files and folders immediately from the cloud backup repository using the client access interface provided by these companies as part of their client service.

Future loss of data can be secured against by using the elaborate Administration panels that come packaged with the cloud backup service. Authentication and authorization protocols can be defined and unauthorized users can be prevented from accessing the data in the cloud backup server. Encryption of data during transmission and storage provide an additional layer of protection to the data. No one can access the data stores without the encryption keys that will be available only with the enterprise availing of the service.

So, if you are shuddering at the thought of data loss and its consequences to your business continuity, you will do well to consider the potential of signing up for an cloud backup service for data backup and security.

About the Author:
Jon Thordarson, KeepItSafe’s European Technical Support Manager, has over 15 years as an industry executive. He is an expert in the world of online backup and data protection. Prior to leading the development of technical infrastructure at KeepItSafe®, Jon co-founded and served as CTO for SecurStore – a leading provider of cloud backup services for enterprise networks. Thousands of businesses trust Jon’s guidance with fluctuating data-compliance requirements through the online publication, “EU Data Protection Regulation”. As a principal contributor, Jon identifies the challenges and opportunities of the EU Data Protection Regulation, while providing expert advice for readers to meet new compliance standards. Visit KeepItSafe’s website here: www.KeepItsafe.com

 

 

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