A Guide to Backing Up Your Small Business
Aussie small business owners are among the humblest you could encounter. Unfortunately, this can contribute to a downfall when valuing and protecting their business and its data.
There are some hard truths Australian small business owners need to consider in 2018:
- With the right tools and support, a small business can compete with big businesses
- Your data is more important to your business than you think. Loss of data will hurt
- Chucking a single backup on an external hard drive is not a suitable solution anymore
- Sorry, but your business is never too small to be hit by a cyber attack
With this in mind, let’s talk about the best ways to protect yourself from data loss in 2018.
Ensure your files and documents are securely stored
Makes sense, right?
But did you know that over 50% of surveyed, Aussie business owners aren’t backing up their data?
We were as shocked as you should be. We’re talking years of customer records, billing & invoicing history and legally binding contracts. All could be wiped out in a flash. Leaving your business open to productivity disruption, reputation damage and even loss of customer loyalty.
Want to know the top causes of data loss to small businesses in Australia? Here they are:
- Accidental data deletion. Yep, that’s right. The number one cause of data loss is human error when handling digital documents. We all make mistakes, make sure yours is quickly reversible with a secure backup.
- Hardware failure. This one hits close to home for me. A few years back a hard drive containing years worth of work died. I was never able to recover those files and documents and to this day I am still dwelling on the loss. I’m not alone, this happens to users every day. Computers crash. Hard drives die. Why-oh-why didn’t I back up to the cloud?
- Ransomware and hackers. Despite popular belief hackers are no longer shady characters huddled in dark corners with their computers. It’s 2018, and hackers have adapted to having automated bots do the deed for them. This means that anyone with a venerability can be a victim, not just big business.
As you can see, the simplest and most sure-fire way to protect yourself is to backup your data to the cloud. This ensures that when these accidents occur, you can quickly and easily recover and continue to grow your business.
This is where we come in. Our cloud backup & disaster recovery plans guarantee your businesses safety and success. We urge all customers to view and consider adding a backup service for their business.
Ever deleted an important email? This one’s for you
It is safe to say that we are all guilty of losing or accidentally deleting important emails.
If you’ve ever tried to recover that email you know it’s not always easy, or even possible in some cases.
Many believe this is the responsibility of the email provider to ensure that this data is backed up and your right, in most cases it is but here are some further thoughts to consider;
- How long is their data retention period? If you lost the email some time ago it may not be possible for the company to recover it. Many providers only allow for a retention period of a few days.
- Many providers have tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of mailboxes hosted. Your mailbox is best represented by that preverbal needle in the haystack resulting is a great level of difficulty to track it down to restore. Often resulting in time and professional service fees.
- The primary intent of the provider’s backup is to ensure that if the platform or service was to go down, they would be able to restore it for their customers and not intended to search for individual emails – many providers even state in their terms and conditions that there is no guarantee that all your data is recoverable.
This is why a rock solid, secure, email backup or archiving service is so important to your business. Having the ability to search and restore emails quickly and easily when needed is an invaluable feature.
When you’re finished here, head over to our plans to learn more about email backup.
You’re backing up your website, right?
Okay, so we’ve touched on this before. Most recently in the article linked below.
Must read: Top reasons you need website backup.
I strongly recommend you head on over and give this article a read.
Your website is the most important digital asset you have. Protect your site from accidental file deletion, hackers and unexpected errors in your updates. Make sure if you run into these issues you are able to quickly and easily revert to a previous version before your customers notice.
Don’t stress, we’ve got your back.
So hopefully by now you understand the importance of reliable backups and that these situations are very real for Australian businesses. There’s a lot to take in and consider. The good news is that OzHosting have you covered with backup solutions for all areas of your business.
Be sure to check out our following solutions before you go. They might just save your business one day:
- Australian Hosted Cloud Backup for PC, Physical Servers, VMs & Smart Phones
- Email Backup & Archiving or something custom for those Office 365 Email users
- Automated Daily Website Backup
Have questions? Give us a call to discuss on (02) 8916 2100 or start a live chat.
Feature Image by: Jacky Chiu via Unsplash
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