3 Stats that Show Just How Important Data Backup Is

Whenever we get the chance, we emphasize the importance of having a business continuity plan. The bigger your business, the more important it is to have a comprehensive plan in place–and when your business loses data, it’s losing countless opportunities in the future. Your business’ future is on the line, and if you don’t take steps to protect it now, you could lose everything you’ve worked so hard to attain in the blink of an eye. Here are some of the most surprising statistics regarding data backup and disaster recovery.

Statistic #1: 75% of Small Businesses Don’t Have a Continuity Policy
It doesn’t matter what kind of business you run. It could be a small mom-and-pop shop or a large business, the importance of continuity is still the same. Ultimately, it comes down to the possibility of a major setback. If you don’t have continuity, you might have to close down for a few days until conditions have improved (if they improve).

Imagine the following scenarios:

• Let’s say you run a deli or other similar small business. The hardware on your payment card system crashes and you lose your customers’ financial information. How do you think they would react to this? It might not be stolen, but the situation doesn’t help anyone.
• You run a small retail business with several employees. What if one of them checks their email and clicks on a link, installing malware on the computer in the process? Something simple like this can be devastating for a business.

A comprehensive data backup strategy can help you combat threats to your business’ continuity. Everything from hardware failure to employee sabotage should be considered for this plan. In other words, you’re preparing for a worst-case scenario, and no stone should be left unturned.

Statistic #2: Over Half of Companies Have Experienced Downtime Lasting Longer Than a Full Work Day in the Last Five Years
Downtime can end even the strongest business. If you experience operational downtime on a regular basis, you’re not producing anything during that time. This also means that nobody is making sales, and you’re paying people to do nothing. From the perspective of data recovery, if you don’t have your data backed up and ready to be restored, downtime is a business killer. If you don’t have data, you can’t get much done.

Redundancy is a key factor for business continuity. A BDR solution provides a network-attached device that can both back up local data and push it to the cloud. This means that it can be found in either location in the event of a disaster, improving the odds of recovering swiftly.

Statistic #3: Nearly 77% of Malware-Compromised Organizations in 2017 Were Hit By “Fileless” Malware
It’s no surprise that the spread of malware has evolved over the past decade, growing more sophisticated and more difficult to handle. There have been times in the past where antivirus solutions and firewalls have failed to handle some of the more recent additions to hackers’ repertoires of threats, resulting in stolen data and corrupted systems.

That being said, fileless attacks aren’t anything new. These types of attacks don’t leave behind executable files, making them more difficult to trace back to their sources and remove. Here are some of the more popular fileless techniques used:

• Registry-resistant: Attackers store malicious scripts in the registry to help them survive system reboots and make it hard to remove.
• In-memory: Attackers utilize exploits and code-injection to load and execute malware straight from a system’s RAM.
• Living off the Land: By injecting malicious code into legitimate admin tools, an attacker can disseminate malware throughout a system without any warning at all.

Regarding data backup, malware attacks can complicate the recovery of your business. If malware manages to infiltrate your network at multiple endpoints, it can be difficult to root out the issue and get it resolved quickly. A data backup and recovery solution can make it much easier to recover, as long as the malware hasn’t managed to corrupt your backups (hence why you store them off-site). You can effectively eliminate downtime and the costs associated with it, since the network-attached device essentially acts as a server until you can get your hardware replaced or repaired.

Ashton Technology Solutions can help prepare you for even the worst scenarios. To learn more, reach out to us at 216-397-4080.