by Steven McElveen
At Nordic Backup we serve 162 business categories to date. The list fascinates me, there’s everything from industrial companies to dog breeders. Some are niches, like “food science” and “pet burial service”. Everyone’s data is vital to their business life and the specter of total loss is the stuff of nightmares for everyone, large and small.
But it happens. Ransomware is now a software industry in its own right (they actually have affiliate programs I’m told) and storms and wildfires get worse every year. New threats are on the horizon, malware attacks on cloud connected files and apps, GrayEnergy malware attacks on our power plants, and crypto-currency continues to feed the beast.
Before coming to Nordic, I owned a small business with a few thousand clients. We had no backup plan at all. Foolishly, being a technologist, I felt the data could always be rescued somehow, some way. 2016 was a real coming out party for Ransomware and that’s when our receptionist opened the fatal email and clicked on the link (with the best of intentions). Everything was encrypted, from our client database to our employee manual. Panicked and sinking, I knew there was no solution other than paying the $3,500 ransom (which I was not going to do).
But the sky did not fall that day. It was sunny, actually, the panic burned that fact into my brain. Our phones were still ringing and it became clear that we were going old school for a while. We reinstalled Windows, downloaded our POS software, and started to rebuild our database from thousands of paper client forms, personal notes, contacts, and schedules. If you’re looking for a silver lining, client communication was never better. There were lots of hiccups and apologies, no growth and some lost revenue, but we survived. Many businesses that experience this can’t say the same. The business is still running today, backed up in the cloud.
Of course, in scenarios like hospitals these attacks can be catastrophic, but for most of us data loss is not doomsday. Yes, we on-board many new customers after they’ve experienced this kind of chaos, but on the bright side we restore customers every day for whom data loss is just a bump in the road. Data loss will stop you in your tracks, that’s a certainty, but it’s not then end. I just encourage all business owners to be smart and take the small about of time to set up a cloud backup solution. Your energy will be better spent growing your business than rebuilding it.
