Avoid Losing Your Data with the Cloud

What would you do if you lost everything? Your pictures, phone numbers, business records, important content that your company needs to operate, just gone in a second?  

Every year, March 31 marks World Backup Day in the tech world—serving as a reminder to individuals and businesses to better protect their data. According to the official World Backup Day website:  

1. 21 percent of people have never made a backup. 
2. 113 phones are lost or stolen every minute.
3. 29 percent of data loss cases are caused by accident.
4. 30 percent of all computers are already infected with malware. 

When it comes to your data, losing it isn’t a matter of if, but when, if you’re not taking the necessary precautions (and the right ones at that). It’s not enough to have antivirus protection on your computer or having everything saved to an external portable hard drive or USB—all of those things can fail and compromise your data. 

This World Backup Day, look to apply the following strategies to help ensure your data remains protected and accessible, no matter what hazards come your way.  

1. Use the Cloud Over On-Site Hosting
   With most data breaches happening inside your business, a properly managed cloud hosting solution that uses top-of-the-line infrastructure is more secure than traditional on-premise hosting. If you or an employee clicks a malicious link in their email or opens a compromised jump drive on their desktop that is directly connected to a server in your building, your network is breached immediately. So regardless of what you may have had backed up on-site or where, it is no longer protected.
   
   The risk can be mitigated by hosting your network on an outside server. When proper authentication protocols are in place, it's easier to stop viruses and malware from spreading through your network. Further, hosting and backing up your dada to the cloud provides you with more flexibility to your data (in case you need to access anything off site), and is a more affordable option than buying and maintaining your own hardware.
   
   
2. Make Sure to Enable Redundancy to Avoid Data Loss and Downtime
   An important element of moving your data to the Cloud is it not only allows you to move your data and backups off-site, but enables you to make multiple copies to be kept in separate, secure data centers. Should a data center go down or be offline, you can still access your data via another server—ensuring no to minimal disruption to business operations. 
   
   Further, it’s better if these data centers are in completely different locations, should the outage be long term due to a fire, hurricane, etc. Having multiple copies of your data that you can access at any point is a critical component of having a solid backup solution for your business.
   
   
3. Employ the Right Cloud Hosting Provider.
   While the Cloud and redundancy options are the most secure and safeguarded methods to protect your data, knowing how to set up and maintain a cloud infrastructure is often a job for the experts. By employing the right cloud hosting provider, you can gain access to as much or as little space needed in their data center to host applications. When it comes to the Cloud, infrastructure matters, so you want to ensure your cloud hosting provider uses industry-leading, best-in-class infrastructure, like IBM power servers. 
   
   Further, the right cloud hosting provider should ensure off-site backups of your system and files to help you recover data that is lost or corrupted. If a file is accidentally deleted, they should be able to restore it for you quickly. If a longer-term issues arises with a data center, the right provider should have the means to get you up and running via redundancy in no time. 

Don’t wait to start backing up your important data! For more information about Cloud hosting or redundancy, be sure to reach out to our support team!