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It's easy for businesses to become complacent when it comes to the security and storage of their data, all too often believing that it won't happen to them or that they will cross that bridge… However, if businesses really knew how it feels to lose their data, they might well change their attitude towards the dealt option of disaster.

Online storage is as secure as physical storage, if not more so, but businesses must understand the risks of online storage so that they can establish measures to ensure that the worst possible outcome is avoided.

This underlying complacency is worrying, because commonly, the only time businesses consider backing up their data is when it has been accidentally wiped from their physical server, or hacked into and stolen from their cloud-based server. Of course, when this happens, there are ways and means of recovering this lost data and often companies and individuals are able to retrieve the majority, if not all, of their files and folders. However, depending on the timing of the last back-up in question, there may well be huge gaps in information concerning that which had been most recently keyed.

If the most recent data backup has not captured important information, and if multiple backups have not been taken in the case of corrupted files, then the business is setting itself up for a fall. After every input of information, your data should be backed up, and this can be arranged automatically. You can set your server (whether physical or in the cloud) to back up every day at the same time, or you can ask employees to do so every time they finish data entry.

Following these procedures will enable your IT technicians to recover close to, if not all, of your lost data in the unlikely event that you find your server has been wiped. Not only this, but with regular backups and an effective procedure in place, recovery of data will actually be a lot faster and reduce those long empty periods of anxiety waiting to see what is actually recovered.

The term backup might take you right back to when you used to save your documents onto a floppy disk in case something happened to your hard drive, and this certainly was an optimum solution at one point in time. However, these days backing up your server means having a physical and a virtual copy: one on your hard drive and one in the cloud. It can also mean having two physical hard drives, both of which are regularly used for backup. One of these drives stays in the office overnight in a fire safe, and the other is taken offsite. All of the above will contribute to an effective backup plan.

Unfortunately, no matter how steadfastly you follow your backup procedure, if you do have a problem with your data and you happen to lose it all, it will take some time to recover everything. This is why we think it is important to ensure that businesses have a documented disaster recovery process, understood and regularly updated, to ensure minimum disruption to the business during recovery time.

This document should not only set out the correct procedures to follow, but it can also contain vital information about the daily goings-on of the business to ensure that the company and its projects continue to turn over during any down time. The last thing you want when facing data loss reduce productivity as well, so prepare for the worst, however unlikely it might be. NC