World Backup Day March 31, 2023 – What can you do to protect your organisation?
The meaning behind World Backup Day
No, this isn’t an early April Fool… but the following day – April Fools’ Day, is often costly for many businesses. Due to April Fool’s Day, there is a marked increase in the quantity of prank emails and websites, many organisations reporting an influx of scam emails and phishing attacks. As a result, April 1 is known for cyber security breaches, data theft and ransomware attacks. This is what started World Backup Day, as a call to action to be prepared against data loss and data theft.
Started in 2011, the Reddit community developed World Backup Day as a reminder to review your content, data storage and backup strategy. It represents a dedicated time to stop and think about the critical need to protect data from potential loss, both for personal and corporate data. The impacts, both financial and reputational, can be incredibly damaging to an organisation, and all sectors are at risk. There was once a thought that healthcare and education were immune, but in the past year, these have also been popular targets by criminals. The good news is that now with many a business investing in the cloud, it is much easier and cheaper than you might think to ensure your data is backed up. The key takeaway message is, don’t risk becoming an April Fool.
Counting the cost
According to SkyKick, one of our backup partners, did you know that…
Cloudally, one of our other partners, cite the Ponemon Institute’s Cost of a Data Breach 2019 report, where the global average cost of a data breach is $3.92 million. Take these two sets of statistics and it is clear that your data, even in the cloud, is vulnerable to loss and breaches. However, it is important to consider that the dangers may not solely be due to criminal activity.
Scenarios of Risk
Equally disruptive are scenarios caused by human error, for example, an account being mistakenly deleted, a critical email lost, or key shared document overwritten. These contents, when stored in the cloud could be quickly restored with the right cloud backup and recovery solution.
With the sudden rise in the use of many different cloud platforms, it is often necessary to synchronize data between them. What if this goes wrong though? Errors are always possible when syncing or updating data between multiple SaaS applications, it may not be seamless and can cause loss of SaaS data.
Clearly, malicious intent is well-reported in the news. Hackers, Malware, Ransomware, Crypto mining and Phishing are just a few of the terms you might have seen on the ever-growing list of malware types, exploits, extortions, and scams. Social engineering, which targets employees with phishing and whaling attacks, is proving to be incredibly successful as per Verizon’s data breach report. The damages due to such data breaches are devastating not only in terms of financial loss, but also damage to the business’ reputation and cause loss of customers. Your SaaS data is also prone to intentional overwrites and deletes by bad actors like disgruntled or malicious employees.
How to protect your organisation?
With the problem in mind, what can you do to protect yourself, your data and your organisation? Cloud backup can be a cost-effective and secure solution, which doesn’t require an investment in additional hardware. We offer this, as part of our Managed Services Solution, which protects your data in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams and OneDrive. Regular snapshots of any protected data are taken, allowing a quick restore of whole areas or particular contents as needed. Our team are able to respond quickly to service tickets, understanding the crucial nature of data restoration.
In disaster recovery scenarios, there is also the option of standby Microsoft tenants. As part of a Managed Service, you may choose to have some key data “streamed” to the secondary tenant just in case. Then, if the worst happens, core functions can continue.
Both services are chargeable options. Our Managed Cloud Backup platform starts from as little as £2.50 per user, while standby Microsoft tenants vary depending on the quantity and type of licence SKU required. If you would like to “stream” some content, additional product charges may apply.
The most important message of this post is to talk about and think about Backup. On March 31st Tweet with #WorldBackupDay, let’s get Backups trending in 2023! You can find out more about World Backup Day here Home | World Backup Day — March 31st
World Backup Day is a conversation starter, but data protection is a constant consideration . If you are interested in finding out more about our Managed Services or Cloud Backup service – please don’t hesitate to come and talk to us.
