Regardless of how big your business is, regular data backups are fundamental to securing your company’s network. In fact, conducting regular backups is undeniably one of the most important steps a business can take to overcome the effects of a network disaster.

According to recent reports cyber-crime is big business and cyber-attacks against all kinds of businesses are on the rise, and even more damaging. Cisco’s 2017 Annual Cyber security Report indicates that the numbers related to ransom ware and other cyber-attacks are quite startling.  Businesses are not only at a risk of losing their data, but also their reputation.

Hacking attacks cost the average U.S. firm more than $15 million each year, and 60% of small businesses that suffer a data breach go out of business within six months. It’s never been more important to invest in online backup of business data.

Effects Of Data Loss To A Business

• More than half of all businesses that are victims of cyber-crimes are subjected to public scrutiny and suffer bad reputation, decreased customer loyalty and trust.
  • Failure to make the necessary measures to identify sensitive data and protect it from misuse or loss could have dire consequences. Whether it’s an inadvertent mistake or a targeted attack, loss of confidential data can reduce shareholder value and cause an irreparable damage to your company’s reputation. Backing up your business data can help greatly to prevent data breaches that could cause such kind of harm.
• Nearly a quarter of businesses that experience cyber-crimes lose significant business opportunities following the data loss event.
  • One trend that’s growing across the corporate world is the spread of ransomware. Once you are hit with this malware, you’ll be forced pay hackers some ransom money so you can regain access to your network. Even small security breaches resulting in the loss of a few files could have crippling financial effect on your business. Unless you can afford to discard money for a preventable problem, then it’s crucial to implement an effective backup strategy sooner. On a major scale, this downtime can easily cost the whole business from staying open.

What Is “Online Backup”?

“Online backup” is also commonly known as “cloud backup”. This is a method of off-site data storage where files, folders or the entire contents of a hard drive are backed up regularly in a remote server. Online backup serves to protect business data from cyber crime, natural and technological disasters as well as human error.

Why Should You Back Up Your Business Data?

1. Protect Against Natural Disasters

Whether it is an earthquake, flood or hurricane a natural disaster can strike at any time. Being caught up in these uncontrollable circumstances can cause your business downtime resulting to loss of revenue and customers. Online data backup ensures your data stays safe to mitigate the effects of a downtime.

2. Reduce The Effect Of A Cyber-Attack

More companies today are moving their data online. Cyber criminals are targeting companies they believe don’t have proper data backup procedures. Online data backup alleviates the impact of an attack and prevents loss of valuable business data. This leads us into the third reason.

3. Protect Your Business Against Ransomware

Today’s cybercriminals are increasingly turning toward ransomware, a virus that can encrypt all the data on your business systems, making files completely inaccessible in a matter of minutes. Ransomware cost enterprises $1 billion in 2016.

Since ransomware is so powerful and only hackers themselves can reverse most cases, the average ransom demand now nears $1,000. For businesses, it can be millions. The only unassailable defense is a total online backup of your data.

4. Keep Client Data Safe

Depending on your business, there are companies that handle a lot of sensitive customer data.  In this case you can’t afford to lose this data or let it slip into the wrong hands. Online backup ensures that client data is properly stored and controlled. This protects your reputation and ensures you are not slapped with unnecessary lawsuits.

5. Human Error & System Failure

Employees are sometimes responsible for huge data losses. It is important for businesses to train employees on how to handle sensitive data.

IT systems are also at risk of failure, to prevent unnecessary downtime it is necessary that you invest in online backup. While drive failure rates have gone down in the last two decades, they do still crash and become unrecoverable from time to time. Not to mention the numerous mistakes people make while using computers. The information on your machines is too important to leave to chance. Not only is your data important to your business, but your customers trust you with their important information, and that’s a responsibility your company can’t take lightly.

6. Restore Data From Anywhere

Before the Internet got popular, many companies would backup their data onto tapes that were stored securely on site. Unfortunately, this wasn’t good protection against theft, fire, or other bad events that could happen physically at the office. Online backup services solve this problem by keeping the data at offsite storage facilities that guarantee the security of files.

Now we have the ability to be able to restore in the cloud and have a business that was down, functioning from a whole another location in the matter of minutes!

7. Auditing, Taxes And Legal Matters

The IRS and most state tax enforcement agencies require that your business keep records going back at least five to seven years. Since you and your employees are unlikely to look at old files regularly, an online backup solution ensures the records remain intact even when failures occur. When time comes to find an old file that can have a big impact on a case, you’ll be happy you backed up everything online where data can be stored up to Petabyte sizes.

8. Maintain The Trust Of Your Customers

The average customer is becoming more aware of online threats and how cybersecurity impacts them. With big names like Yahoo reporting all 3 billion of its accounts hacked and the Equifax breach costing consumers $4.1 billion, average people want to know their sensitive data is safe.

With regular online backup, you can minimize the effect of cybercrime on your users. A backup ensures that your customers can access their critical services as quickly as possible, potentially within just a few minutes of a security breach.

This helps ward off negative PR and consumer complaints that can snowball into lost business.

9. Minimize Downtime

Coming back from losing every piece of information about your customers and recent orders can take a long time to recover from, and every hour your business is down counts as money lost. A quality online backup system can restore all your data within minutes or hours, meaning you can get back to work as if nothing really happened.

10. Maintain Regulatory Compliance

Enterprises in regulation-driven industries like healthcare and finance are especially at risk from hackers. Losing your data can leave you out of compliance with record-keeping and auditing standards. An online backup protects you from the costly “one-two punch” of regulatory fines on top of the damage from a data breach.

It’s never too early to start backing up your enterprise data – but it can be too late. To get started right away, contact us.

Conclusion

The above reasons prove that backing up data should not be an afterthought. Letting a professional IT company support to back up your business data will not only save you serious money, but it will also prevent your company from making the wrong kind of headlines. If you are a business owner or manager looking for IT services in NJ/NYC, our off-site backup solutions will come in handy. Contact us for more information on how we can help back up your business data and protect your brand.