In today’s hyper-connected world, companies across all industries rely on computers to run their operations. Employees use computers for numerous tasks, such as tracking products and services, communicating with customers, and recording many types of essential data. And since most modern businesses depend on data to sustain their services, it’s imperative to put proper backup and recovery solutions in place to prevent data loss.
Whether you run a small or big business, the risk of losing data to an unfortunate event is always a possibility. This can seriously disrupt your company’s operations, which also lowers customer confidence and satisfaction. In the worst of cases, some companies never recover after a massive data loss. To protect your business, you must have a reliable backup disaster recovery appliance that ensures your data is secure.
Here are five major reasons why you should prioritize investing in backup and recovery solutions for your company:
Calamities are unpredictable
Though we hope it never happens, a disaster can strike when you least expect it. A hurricane might cause flooding, or an earthquake might devastate your office location. During a heavy storm, your building might become prone to electrical issues that can lead to fires. When these things happen, it’s not enough to have an insurance plan to cover the financial aspect of damage to your business property. You must think ahead and set up proper data backup and recovery solutions to protect your company’s data.
Rebuilding your business after a disaster is never easy. As such, your recovery plan should prioritize backing up all your data. This way, you’ll have all the important information and operational data you might need to set up shop again.
One way to keep your data safe is to not only use a local or onsite high availability (HA) appliance but also to employ a remote disaster recovery (DR) appliance that is placed offsite and will let you boot up your protected servers in the event of a site-wide failure in your location. Relying on a cloud-based backup and full recovery system is another method you can employ. This fail-safe setup ensures that your data is kept safe even if your main office suffers from a fire, flooding, or other unfortunate disasters. With your data intact, you can resume your operations as soon as you find a new location and procure new equipment.
Employees might make mistakes
Companies invest in training employees and optimizing their workflow to increase efficiency and minimize errors in their daily work. Mistakes due to human error can also be reduced by automating certain tasks, such as computing payments or generating inventory reports. But even with proper training and automating processes, your people could still make mistakes that can result in your company experiencing data loss. Now and then, an employee might overwrite data or mistakenly delete a large volume of files.
While some programs allow you to retrieve some files, you might find it hard to recover certain types of data. In some cases, employees could damage the actual hardware, instantly compromising the physical repositories of those data. If you have no backup system for your important and business-critical files, you will have no way to recover them. As such, the best way to prevent data loss is to maintain a reliable backup and disaster recovery system.
Problems in computer or network hardware
Many companies lose their data when their hardware malfunctions due to damage. Hard drive or data center failure might be caused by several factors, such as a power surge, mishandling of the computer unit, and overheating caused by too much dust in the hardware’s components.
Certainly, you can help prevent hardware damage by using power surge protective devices, by installing air conditioning units, by employing enterprise-class air purifiers, and by periodic cleaning and maintenance of your devices.
Over time, however, all hard drives eventually slow down and wear out. Signs that a computer hard drive might be failing include a freezing computer screen, grinding noises from the computer unit, and files appearing to be randomly corrupted. To anticipate hard drive failure, you must make sure to regularly save data across all of your company’s computers via a backup and disaster recovery system.
Digital crimes and data breaches
Data loss might also be caused by criminal elements that employ viruses or launch ransomware attacks to compromise a business’s computer network. If a hacker gains significant access to a company’s system, they can steal and delete massive amounts of information. This can seriously affect your business operations.
In some unfortunate cases, rogue employees might be in on the effort to breach your data. This could compromise your company’s reputation and cause great revenue loss. After all, massive data breaches cause customers and investors to lose trust in companies, which also makes it harder to retain and attract more customers.
To prevent data breaches, businesses must have secure cybersecurity measures along with reliable backup and disaster recovery solutions in place. This way, you can assure your customers that your company has a solid security plan in place to keep their data safe, just in case a cyberattack occurs.
Gain a competitive advantage in the market
Data loss causes long periods of service delays for businesses. This means you might lose loyal customers to competitors if you don’t resume operations right away. Having an excellent data backup and disaster recovery system allows your company to keep providing continuous services to customers. The faster you can recover your operations, the sooner you can attend to your customers’ needs. And if you can keep running your business smoothly, customers will feel more satisfied with your services. Your reliable reputation will also attract more people to patronize your company.
These are just several reasons why your business should invest in proper backup and disaster recovery solutions. Ultimately, backing up your data using a reliable system ensures that your company can bounce back in case of natural disasters, human errors, hardware failures, and even cyberattacks. Make sure to regularly backup your data to ensure that your company is protected.
