Consistent Data backup is Vital for Small Businesses
Data can be difficult to manage. With so many different sources dragging more and more data into your home and work life every day, it can get out of control. Every email, every spreadsheet, every single document you encounter; that’s data that needs to be managed. Data backup is one of the most vital steps in that management process.
Data backup is particularly important for small businesses and brokers as it fulfills their compliance requirements. As time goes on, regulators are becoming more and more focused on digital data, which means data backup is only going to get more important for highly-regulated industries, like finance.
Manual Data Backup is a Time Consuming Process
There are a number of different ways to back up your data. The majority of small businesses at the moment use tape data backup. This involves the daily, or weekly, copying of all of your data onto, preferably, two digital tapes. The tapes are then stored in a fire safe location, one on site and the other in a separate secure location. The alternative is to use cloud data backup, which copies the data to an online location rather than a physical tape.
The Challenge for small businesses is staying on top of your data. If you use tape data backup, that task needs to be done manually. So every day or every week, someone will need to perform a backup and then store the tapes appropriately. In small businesses, where time is precious, this often becomes a low priority task. Data backup becomes the thing you’ll get to when all the work is done.
Compliance Requires Complete Data Backups
This can lead to inconsistent or even non-existent data backup. Which means you either end up spending even more time backing up all the data you missed, or you end up with big gaps in your data backup. This can cause a real problem when the regulator calls.
You might know that you’re missing a weeks worth of documents from last month because you were short on cover while staff were on holiday. But the regulator might not view it so innocently. Missing data, implies intentionally missing data and that could cause real problems.
For this reason, it’s vital that small businesses ensure there aren’t any gaps in their data backups. The most efficient way to do that is to replace your tapes with cloud data backup. Cloud backup automatically copies data to the cloud as soon as you save the data. So you’ll always be sure your data backup is complete.