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5 Ways to Backup Your Data Safely

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=””]I[/fusion_dropcap]s your data really safe?  

It’s December. Tax season is approaching, and Jane’s small tax consulting business is taking on all the work it can handle. After all, nearly one third of her annual revenue is earned between January and March. Jane has so much to do that she heads to the office early Saturday morning to try to clear her backlog and prioritize clients for the coming week. But when she fires up her desktop computer, there’s a sinister message in red font: “All your data has been encrypted. If you want it back, pay $1,000 in bitcoin at the following site.”  

What?? She runs from one computer to the next, and they all have the same message. It’s a ransomware infection, and it happens in small to medium business every day. Jane paid the ransom, ultimately $2,000, but her data was never returned. When she tries to restore from her daily backup, she finds that it will not load. The process apparently has been broken for months. Her data is gone, and so is her credibility with nearly all of her clients. 

It Doesn’t Have to Happen to You

As I’ve shared before, small to medium business are the targets of cyberattacks more often with each passing day. The reality of the situation is that all companies will be hacked at least once, and some more than once. On top of that, plenty of companies have been hit by plain old computer theft. Someone walks out with the company server or laptops. This sort of extreme data loss can cause a lot of damage to a company. Some companies don’t survive at all.  

So, what should you do? Keep backups. Lots of backups. Daily backups. Weekly backups. Monthly backups. But is that enough? Unfortunately, no.  

Unless you plan your backups carefully, and regularly test your backup process to be sure they actually worked and you can restore from them, you’re just fooling yourself. Even Fortune 500 companies have made this same mistake. We assume those backups are trustworthy, but sometimes they’re not.  

So, here are five ways to back up your business data safely: 

1. Be sure you have a scheduled backup process. Relying on someone to regularly do the job, rather than automating it, is a common failure. 
2. Make sure you’re backing up the all the important data. Don’t assume all your data is on your office server. It’s not. Laptops and desktops need backups, too. 
3. Keep your backups off site, somewhere away from the office. Don’t let a simple office fire or flood destroy your servers and your business. 
4. And here’s the most important one: regularly test your backups. I’ve seen some big companies lose a lot of data because the backups they created would not restore properly. Backups are worthless if you can’t restore from them. I recommend testing backups by restoring from them at least twice per year. 
5. But the best way to keep your data safe is to find a solution that does all these things for you – keep it where scheduled backups occur automatically, somewhere safe, not in your office but off site.  Somewhere that’s duplicated across multiple data centers in diverse locations.  That solution is cloud storage. 

A Better Way

At realquantum, we keep our customers’ data in the cloud. We maintain daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backups. We maintain redundant copies in multiple data centers all across the country. We test our backup processes regularly. And over it all, we apply bank-grade encryption and security measures. 

We do all this, not just because it’s the best way to do it. We do it because it’s the only way to make sure our customers are secure and successful. At realquantum, we’re fiercely committed to customer success. 

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