Maintaining regular backups of your data and storage systems is an important step toward protecting yourself from human errors and hardware failure. But to truly be fully protected, you must consider offsite back as an addition to the Business Continuity Plan to ensure you are also protected from cyber-attacks and natural disasters.
In recent years we have witnessed more and more security breaches involving the hijacking of local backups. In addition to that, we have seen an uptick in natural disasters causing property damage affecting all walks of business.
Offsite data backup is essential for any size business
Here are 6 major reasons to consider it:
- Added redundancy: If you delete a file, folder, or a user, whether you meant to or not, that deletion is replicated across your network and may have to be restored by using a backup.
- Internal Security Threats: Many businesses experience threats from the inside, some are often unintentional like accidentally deleting a user or dealing with a breach from a lost or stolen device. Having a high-grade rapid recovery solution mitigates the risk of critical data being lost or destroyed.
- External Security Threats: Ransomware, malware, and viruses have done significant destruction to the networks of many organizations globally in just the past year alone. An attacker intent on doing your company harm might also attempt to gain administrative access to your network via phishing, social engineering, or even taking advantage of a vulnerability in the software itself.
- Compliance Requirements: Current retention policies do not address legal hold requirements and will not stand up to a rogue employee or fake administrator purposely making changes to derail them. While a well-meaning employee attempting to save space can easily disable versioning or reduce it to a very low number rendering it practically useless. Offsite backups will ensure you can retrieve data from any period as required for legal action or to meet any regulatory compliance needs.
- Outage and Shutdown: SaaS outages are more common than you might think. Microsoft Azure suffered a substantial outage that lasted for two days in October 2020 during which people were unable to access their data. Can you imagine being unable to access any data during an outage?
- Gaps in the Retention Policy: Offsite backup will provide longer, more accessible retention for easy recovery.
How Do Offsite Backups Work?
The best solutions take a full snapshot of your entire system each day. The data is then encrypted for transit and often compressed before being transmitted to the designated secure location for storage. Then your information is incrementally backed up at intervals throughout the day, saving only the changes to your file system. Providing this type of service allows for multiple recovery restore points.
If you want to learn more about how we can help you implement offsite backup for your own network, or you are interested in learning more about our solution, give our office a call.
Braver Technology Solutions | WeMakeITWork@BraverTechnology.com
Boston 617.315.8515 | Taunton 508.824.2260 | Providence 401.484.7900