Most businesses utilise a data backup solution to help protect their data knowing that a data loss can potentially cost them thousands of pounds and significantly affect the running of the business. There are several data backup methods that are utilised to help protect critical data which either keeps it onsite or offsite. Keeping your data onsite or offsite alone brings different advantages and disadvantages so ideally a solution which can keep an onsite copy and offsite copy is ideal.
By implementing a backup solution which only keeps a copy of your data onsite places it at greater risk at becoming lost or stolen. If you suffer from a disaster such as a flood, fire or a natural disaster, the percentage of your live working data and your backups being destroyed or significantly damaged is increased. The staff from an Australian primary school suffered from the perils of only having an onsite backup earlier this month when their server was hacked into and their data was made inaccessible.
The staff at Byron Community Primary School soon found out that they couldn’t access data and modify existing financial and medical records. A couple of days after the initial hack, the school received an email demanding $5,000 in exchange for their data. Although the local authorities were contacted regarding this, the school didn’t receive much help as they were told that there was very little that they could do.
The IT staff did manage to recover a small amount of data from the drives, although the vast majority of it remained inaccessible. An attempt was made to recover the data from a backup that was kept onsite, but this was also encrypted and therefore making it useless.
Frank Binkley who is the school’s finance manager stated, “There’s a really big important message out there for small businesses – make sure you have off-site data backup.” Binkley also confirmed that the school will start to backup their data offsite to a third party server along with keeping their onsite backups.
By utilising a data backup solution which keeps your data offsite means that you will always have a copy of your data available, no matter what happens at your office. By only implementing an onsite data backup solution, your critical business data is being put at greater risk of being lost or destroyed in the event of a disaster. If you suffer from a disaster and cannot recover your data as the backups have become damages or lost, then the time spent running and monitoring backups on a daily basis has been futile.
Do you backup your data offsite? Do you feel the need to utilise an offsite data backup solution?
