Despite a widening public acceptance of cloud technology and the security benefits it adds, many businesses still aren’t convinced of the importance and need for cloud backup in keeping their business data protected. Whether it’s because they think they’re safe with physical device storage or they don’t think data loss can happen to them — running a business without a cloud backup in place can have devastating, yet preventable, repercussions. While there are many reasons to adopt cloud backup into your business’s overall data management plan, these are the core benefits that you may be overlooking if you’ve been operating your business without this critical component:
Reduced costs and improve scalability
Prior to virtualization, businesses had been forced to attach data to physical storage devices. This meant purchasing hardware, reserving space for it, paying employees to maintain it, and placing orders for more equipment as data amounts grew and storage needs expanded.
Cloud backup simplifies and improves upon physical device storage in many ways (which we will touch on more below) but most notably to business owners observiant of cost efficiency, it is less expensive to maintain and affords greater options for scalability.
Rather than purchasing and maintaining expensive equipment, and employing professionals to design and maintain it, businesses can store and backup their data with a reliable cloud backup provider. Data is stored securely in the cloud and monitored by experts, with unlimited storage level expansion just an upgrade away.
Eliminate data loss for good
Data loss has many faces. It can come in the form of natural disaster (like flood or fire), physical device damage, theft or loss, and as a result of human error. Many physical storage devices are unsuited to withstand these data loss risks and don’t afford businesses the ability to recover data when it’s been jeopardized.
Often, with physical device storage, data destroyed, deleted or lost is gone forever. This can put businesses at risk financially and legally — slowing or even halting operations, raising red flags among regulators, and damaging a business’s reputation among customers.
Businesses that utilize cloud backup and who face the same risks are able to eliminate data loss for good and recover from potential disasters faster or even before they occur — preventing these business threats from wreaking havoc.
Retrieve data on your terms
Businesses who make cloud backup a part of their IT plan have the ability to recover and restore data when they need it most. Rather than having to take an affected device to a data recovery specialist, taking up precious time with no promise of actual retrieval, business with cloud backup can simply locate their backed up files through their secure online portal and easily restore one, multiple, or all of their files in just a few clicks to the original, repaired, or new device.
By backing up with a cloud backup provider that offers unlimited previous file version histories, businesses can even recover data from any point in time in order to undo and recover from accidental errors, deletions and more.
Never miss a backup
Cloud backup enables backup automation — taking human error and skipped backups out of the equation so your business’s data backup is always complete, reliable and up-to-date.
Automatic and continuous backup affords even greater protection, backing up changes and new files as they’re made and created, and only backing up changed files to maximize storage level usage. Your provider should also monitor and send you backup reports so you’re notified of successful backups and alerted to any potential errors.
Give viruses the slip
Many businesses don’t realize they’ve been infected with a virus until it’s too late and the damage has been done. Ransomware viruses can be particularly damaging — hijacking all of a company’s data until the company complies with ransom demands.
Emailed backup reports with unusually high numbers of recently changed data are often the first indication that a ransomware virus has hijacked and encrypted a company’s files. Without these reports, many businesses don’t realize they have a virus until it’s too late.
Even business who backup their data with a provider who offers 30 days of previous file version history retention are at risk for losing their data to ransomware cyber criminals. If the virus is caught outside of the 30 day recovery window, businesses may not be able to restore data from before the virus took over.
With a reliable cloud backup provider that sends email backup reports and offers unlimited previous file version history retention, businesses can catch viruses early in order to eradicate them and have an unlimited window of time to recover and restore their data in its intended state in the event that a virus is caught late.
No matter how you look at it, cloud backup offers companies with many benefits and levels of data protection that cannot be achieved through any other technology. But choosing the appropriate cloud backup provider is just as important as realizing you need it to begin with.
To protect your business data with continuous, automatic cloud backup with unlimited previous file version retention, start your 30 day free trial of Nordic Backup today and experience the difference of total peace of mind.
