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5 Reasons It’s Essential that You Perform Regular Backups

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You may have heard the phrase “Save early, save often” when talking about financial advice, but it applies to the world of business as well. For some reason, a lot of business owners are still slacking when it comes to data security and end up paying dearly. Having a backup strategy in place is far more than a business best practice; it could literally end up saving your business. Here are five reasons it’s essential that you perform regular backups of both critical business data and working data.

The High Cost of Downtime

A University of Texas study found that around two fifths of businesses that suffer a major data loss never recover. Many of them closed within two years.

Setting up automated backups , having a plan to ensure you back up the data you can’t live without, and having an effective disaster recovery plan helps ensure that your business stays open. You’ll minimize the risk of being crippled by the data loss, too, because automated backups and a data recovery plan keep your downtime to a minimum. A side benefit is the fact that having regular, full backups done automatically means you won’t have to rebuild everything that’s happened in the weeks or months since the last backup. All time spent on data recovery is time you aren’t spent working on your business, and your customers suffer for it.

Hackers

Whatever your line of business, hackers are always there lurking in the background. They may attempt to destroy your IT infrastructure or try to steal sensitive data on your clients.

And sometimes, your employees are the ones leaving doors wide open. Any hacker can simply send a socially engineered email, and your employee will do the rest. Then your data could get deleted by a malicious party or because you failed to pay ransomware.

Natural Disasters

A fire in your store may destroy the inventory, but there is a fair chance it destroys the computers and servers on site, too. If you want to prevent natural disasters like fires, earthquakes, and floods from crippling your business, have critical data backed up to a different location.

Legal Requirements

Many if not all businesses are legally required to keep business records for a certain period of time. This may be necessary for tax purposes. It may also be necessary to meet other regulatory requirements. Regular backups ensure that you don’t lose the files you can’t do without when tax time or a regulatory audit comes around. Backups to secondary sites ensures these files can’t be lost in a local disaster, and that redundancy may simply be required to remain within compliance with various government rules.

The best data backup services let you specify things like retention policies and file filters so that you only back up for the long term what must be backed up and saved for the long term.

As a Selling Point

A business with good data backup processes and redundancy can use this as a selling point with its customers. If your business works with clients, the fact that you will never lose their data is something they’ll appreciate. And they may love you if you have their files despite the fact that their own computer crashed.

Backing up non-critical files incrementally and performing full backups of critical files like financial data on a regular basis is so important that you cannot afford not to do it.