We all know how hard it is to protect ourselves from threats like malware or ransomware when surfing the Web, just as it is hard to avoid any physical damage to our computers and their components. All these things can potentially cause the loss of data, which is exactly why performing backups is of utmost importance, from regular users to businesses.
And, while the losses faced by regular users should not be disdained, businesses can potentially have a lot more to lose. Vital contracts and other documents, and personal information of their employees and clients, are just a couple of examples of the information that can be lost, which can be a complete disaster in more than one way.
With this in mind, it is very clear that backups are mandatory for every single company. In order to get a glimpse on how much businesses follow this golden rule, CloudBerry Lab, a major company in cloud-based backup and file management services to small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), carried out a survey showing the current state of backup in corporate – and the results are not exactly uplifting.
By surveying more than 400 full-time employees from around the world, it was possible to conclude that, while many companies are modernizing their backup strategies the right way, several others lack many key aspects in this subject. The most shocking conclusion is that nearly half of respondents (49 percent) keep a single copy of their business data, which can potentially be catastrophic and disruptive to their entire operations, should that data become inaccessible.
Nearly 36 percent of the surveyed people claim they backup their entire business data – while this is a very positive aspect to retain from the survey, it is overshadowed by the fact that an equal number of respondents reported that they no backups whatsoever. So, it comes as no surprise that over a fourth (27 percent) of the respondent group lost business data “several times”.
44 percent of respondents performing backups rely on physical drives to do so, while a small number (26 percent) uses cloud services for their backups. Most respondents cited “security concerns” as the number one reason for not resorting to the cloud.
These results show a that a disturbing number of companies still do not look at backups as essential to the reliability of their operations, as well as some misinformation regarding certain aspects of this activity, such as the security of cloud services or how many backups locations they should have.
This is especially worrying considering the huge growth of ransomware attacks we are seeing, and how easy it is to recover from them if we have backups of our data. Thus, it becomes evident that companies need to be informed about the importance of backups, in order to avoid total disruptions of their activities.
