Backup is the only thing you can control – Especially for Small and Medium firms

Backup is the only thing you can control – Especially for Small and Medium firms

Data is the heart of many business today. Information about customers, staff, internal resources and need to be accessible to allow business operations to continue.

The data that is needed at any given point of time continues to grow larger. New advancements in Business Intelligence, Analytics and the growth of the AI powering these trends means that the average employee now powers through multitudes of the amount of data he/she would have just 3 years ago.

Yes this explosion in data is no accompanied by threats to that data. 

The news of high-profile leads through or hacks is almost a weekly occurrence today. No institution seems to be safe. 
The Singapore government on realizing the futility of tried to protect their systems in a connected world decided to cutoff the internet access from employees devices.

When the government of of one of the highest gdp per capita countries in the world, can’t stomach the risks of being connected what chance do smaller firms like of most of our customers have? Is it even possible to protect our systems today?

The threats and protections will continue to evolve at breathtaking speed. We at DCI continue to see many innovations in security systems. New AI driven products that detect and eliminate threats in our clients network before any damage is done.  Truly exciting what some of the products can do even against zero-day threats. However this article isn’t about that. This article is about the SME’s for whom many of these solutions may not make economical sense.

For many SME, the reputational damage that may come from a leak or a cyber-attack is something they may brush-off. Many larger firms have been able to pull it off. Some good PR, outreach to customers exhorting the improvements made etc can undo much of the damage. Thats not quite the case if you lose access to the data.

Many of our newer SME customers share how they first purchased a crypto-currency. It was after they were targeted by a ransomware attack. Loss of access to data is catastrophic. Everything thing stops if you can access that information. No way to get your inventory, make new orders, send out invoices, or even pay salaries.

That’s where backup strategies that rely on backing up your data isolated from your primary systems come into play.

Cyber-attacks are not the only threats that backup protects again. Hardware systems fail, human error happens. Power outages occur.

Traditionally these were the reasons we had backup, that or you had 7 year audit requirements. Today however the threat of losing access to your data and any kind of operations is the prime driver for backup demand. Backups can still be compromised however and we have already seen that with some other clients. Backup really needs to be kept isolated from the rest of your environment where someone who manages to get into your system cant compromise it, otherwise its pointless as a safeguard.

That’s where cloud backup fits really really well. The scale and flexibility of cloud storage options is something an SME is going to be hard pressed to match. Archive-tier storage options makes it cheaper to keep those older copies. You can change the amount you backup on the fly and your costs scale accordingly almost immediately. The flexibility of quickly adjusting to meet new RPO and RTO needs. Use cloud backup and sleep a little more soundly.