Organizations are generating more data than ever, with market pundits throwing frightening market statistics. IDC projects that by 2025, the “global data sphere” will expand to 163 zettabytes (ZB) or 1 trillion gigabytes. Moreover, that figure will be 10 times the 16.1 ZB created in 2016. That is a substantial amount of data, especially when you have to mirror a significant percentage of them just to keep your business protected.
India is witnessing the world’s highest number of data breaches over the last 2 years and the average cost of a data breach rising 8% year-on-year to Rs.11.9 crores ($1.7 million). It is crucial for businesses of any size to encrypt, protect and backup their data regularly. We live in an era where data corruption or breaches happens very frequently. When valuable business data gets deleted or affected by a virus, it is either going to end the business or cost the business, days to re-setup their business. Significant reasons for data loss is database corruptions which could be because of human errors/data deletion, power surges, hard disk failures, system crashes, improper shutdown, software corruption, natural disasters, data theft from hackers or insiders.
Challenges with legacy back up
A well known pharma retail & distribution company with a vision to provide the best health care services to its customers, did not realise the importance of data-backup even after the first ransomware attack. They realised that the manual back-up was
- People-dependent
- Time-consuming
- Error-prone
- Labour and skill intensive
- Vulnerable
- Harder and unreliable
- Time-consuming restoration based on the size of the data
- Most importantly, rising hardware storage costs
Business like the above lose critical data like stock, customer and supplier information, accounting data and getting their business back running is a nightmare. As seen above, most of these circumstances aren’t completely in the hands of the retailer. They occur due to external factors like improper maintenance of systems, hardware failures, power surges and even natural calamities. Restoring the lost data and finding an alternative in the meanwhile take months to figure out.
Hence, in order to mitigate the loss of data, a proper backup system in place is essential for any business. Setting up one’s own backup might be time-consuming and expensive as it involves additional costs in the form of hardware like servers, hard-drives, computers and also one has to hire an IT professional exclusively to manage this. For a newly started company, this might be a challenge and also an added expense.
The Future, Backup as a Service (BaaS)
According to IDC reports, by 2020 nearly 40% of the information/data will be “touched” by cloud computing providers meaning that a byte will be stored, processed in a cloud somewhere in its journey from originator to disposal. Added to that increasing use of internet and its services has resulted in cloud backup known as BaaS (Back-up-as a service).
Why worry about identifying data-storage methods, define their backup and recovery strategy when vendors can manage them for you. With BaaS, the complexities of data protection are now managed by the vendor. Cloud backup services have revolutionised the backup process for several reasons. Here’s how:
- Lowered total cost of ownership: No upfront investment in infrastructure, no skill or expertise required to manage backup
- Completely automated: Data backup process happens in the background, setup once and it keeps on running
- Less time consuming: Data backup is periodic, incrementally and real-time
- Secured and reliable: Cloud back up in Amazon data centre providing protection against malware and ransomware
- 100% business continuity: Restoration is fast and can be done with a single click
- Enhanced business efficiency: Peace of mind as no skill is required since cloud backup is automatic. Hence, businesses can now focus on growth
Whether backup is local or automated, businesses need to have a backup strategy before the catastrophic data loss happens. Traditional backup methods do not guarantee 100% data protection and businesses thus need cloud data backup services i.e., backup as a service.
Business Nirvana is all about future-proofing data backup and restore methods, smooth running of business and most importantly, peace of mind with no disruption or loss of data. Imagine if data backup is made as simple and automatic as restoring your phone data from cloud with just one click!
If you want to safeguard your business data, click here