Call us now on 023 9298 8855

Is your backup plan good enough to protect your data?

How you handle data in case of a breach, or bigger issue, could be the difference between prosperity and a long, drawn-out recovery. Here’s why.

By:

Hi everyone! Zarte here! Good work on the DoS attack, but I have a back-up!

And backing up is exactly what I’m going to be talking about today. Because what would you do tomorrow if your business burnt down? You can scoff all you want, but as we said a while back, an office next to us burnt down last month, and it led to all of us in the area thinking – well, what if that were us?

I mean, I guess to an extent it depends on what your business does, as to how much you stand to lose. In some instances, you’re losing stock and your premises, but whilst it’ll still be an enormous blow, over time you should be able to redeem these things through your insurance.

But if your business relies on other things... data and the like? What then? If your computer houses data, and gets ruined in the fire, do you have a backup plan? And what is it?

Some people will make files on their hard drive, and then copy them to CD/USB etc. – this is fine, in some respects, but doesn’t cover the fire eventuality if you leave it in the office with the rest of your stuff. OK, so then you take the USBs/disks with you. But even this has several issues, I mean for one, is it encrypted? It only takes one occasion when you leave a disc on a train, or someone steals a USB from your coat pocket, and that’s a lot of potentially sensitive information in the ether. And OK, that might seem unlikely, but it can happen. Even more likely is that human error and circumstance play a part. Like the one time that it’s needed, you’re abroad or in hospital, and no-one can get to it. Or that you’ve had a few big deadlines and it’s just totally slipped your mind to get things backed up.

All of the above are totally understandable things, but they’re all avoidable with some form of online backup. In essence, all of your files are automatically backed up on a daily basis, and then stored in a staggered fashion for up to 4 weeks, meaning that if you have a security breach and need to back up to 2 weeks previous, you can, or if the worst should happen, you can just get the most recent files directly. This is a service that BEA offer, but rather than me just wittering on, why don’t I give you a couple of case studies, from actual customers of ours?

Customer A – we’ll call them Milli - bought a network drive to store all their data on. We recommended online backup at the time but they decided that because the drive had two disks in it the chance of both failing was too small to worry about. Of course, both failed. Their data was recoverable, but it cost about £600 for specialist involvement. They immediately bought online backup at that point, which for the amount of data they had only costs £20/month. That’s 2 and a half years’ worth of online backup fees that they forked out because they hadn’t taken it up.

Customer B – we’ll call them Vanilli – They keep a spreadsheet with accounts information for easy reference. The spreadsheet is updated daily. Unfortunately, a disgruntled employee decided to resign and in the run up to doing so started removing little bits of data from this sheet each day, so that the figures were wrong. It wasn’t until a week later (2 weeks after the employee started tinkering, a week after she’d left) that the client realised the sheet was all wrong. Thankfully, she had online backup which keeps previous versions of files for 4 weeks, so we were able to revert the sheet back to an earlier version.

Believe me, Vanilli was much the happier customer for having engaged our services.

So, if you think you’d like to begin backing up your files online, then now would be a great time to have a chat with us. Our prices are based directly on the amount of data you have, so backing up a few files really won’t cost you the earth, but will provide you with peace of mind.

As ever, if you’re interested give us a call. Or even give us a call just to ask us a question, or share your feelings on the blogs. Seriously, it gets quite lonely just being whipped whilst being told to write these articles.

Until next time,

Zarte