Is your business at 'high risk' for losing data?

The 31st March 2022 is ‘World Backup Day’ – a chance to get prepared against data loss and data theft.  Simon Rogers at Northern Telecom explains why businesses should be thinking about their backups.

You’ve probably experienced that sinking feeling when you realise you’ve lost some important data.  Maybe it’s because you forgot to save a file, or maybe you’ve done what I’ve done (on more than one occasion) and emptied a full mug of coffee over your laptop.  For many UK businesses, the ‘oh no’ moment is even bigger, when the data loss affects an entire server.  In those circumstances, it’s not just one file or laptop that’s affected.  It’s no longer just an inconvenience, it can leave a business fighting for survival.

The sad truth is that a quarter of UK small and medium sized businesses don’t backup their data at all, leaving themselves at high risk of losing critical information.  With no backup at all, and information residing on staff laptops or one server, if something beyond your control causes a data loss, there is nothing you can do to recover that data.  It’s gone forever.  How would the business cope if it lost valuable commercial data, or customer information.  How would it continue to trade? Research in the US has shown that 60% of businesses that suffer a major data loss go out of business within the next six months.*

Right now, you’re either panicking about the backups in your own business, or sitting back reassured that you’re performing regular backups, but hold on a second.  Of the 76% of SMEs that do perform regular backups, 29% of those firms keep their backups on the same site as the original data.  So what happens if there’s a fire, a major power spike, a flood or other business disruption that wipes out both the primary and backed-up data?  Well then you’re as vulnerable as the businesses that aren’t backing up at all.

Maybe you’re still resting easy, because you backup data and take it off-site at the end of each day.  Well that can help, but that still adds a risk of information being stolen or lost.

So what can you do?

As a first step, we recommend that you speak to an IT specialist, like Northern Telecom.  We work with customers to understand their IT infrastructure and work out a plan to ensure that your critical business information is backed-up on a daily basis.

Your backup strategy will depend on your specific needs, but businesses used to be advised to follow the 3-2-1 rule for backups:

• Keep three copies of your data – the original data and two backup copies
• Your backups should be on two different types of media (typically disk and tape)
• One of your backups should be offsite

That was great advice in the early noughties, but times have changed and businesses now have access to internet bandwidth and cloud based data centres that simply weren’t available 20 years ago.

At Northern Telecom, we now follow a 3-2-1-1 rule:

• Keep three copies of your data – the original and two backup copies
• Backups should be kept at two different data centres (we use London and Leeds)
• One backup should be taken daily, one should be taken as a snapshot at a less regular interval (this means that if someone makes a mistake, deletes or overwrites a critical file, you have the option of going back to a previous state).

Back-ups can be surprisingly cost-effective.  Northern Telecom offers backup storage up to 25GB of data held in our two data centres for just £7.99 per service/user being backed-up.  At your request, we can also perform tests to ensure that backed-up data can be restored (something that companies often overlook until it’s too late).

To find out more about how Northern Telecom can help protect your data, call us on 0113 831 5555 or email us at support@northerntelecom.co.uk.

*Major data loss defined as a data loss that cannot be recovered within 10 days