How Old Is Your Data?

Posted by: TAZ Networks on March 17, 2017 at 2:33 pm

How recent is the data on your server? Your hardworking employees are busy all day — sending emails, updating databases, creating documents. Accounting is busy entering payments and sending out invoices. Your handy server is storing it all, so everything’s up-to-the-minute, right?

Or is it?

Consider this sobering thought: Your essential business data is only as up-to-date as your last backup.

Why would we say this?

We had a client recently get hit with a particularly nasty ransomware that wiped their server clean. After we cleared the infection, the next step was to restore the company files from backup. This is standard procedure in the IT industry. When we checked the backup, however, we got some bad news. The most recent backup was from three weeks prior.

Three.

Weeks.

Why? This client had not yet upgraded to TAZ Cloud Backup, or any other sort of cloud backup. They relied on an employee to swap out a pair of hard drives each week. The drive currently attached the server was also corrupted during the attack. So we checked the other drive and, guess what? The employee got busy, or forgot, and the drives hadn’t been swapped for, yep, three weeks.

Without a more recent backup, the only other option was to pay the ransom, which is a problem for several reasons. Reason #1 for this client was that the ransom was approximately $12,000.

In the end, the business owner decided it was better to enforce some mandatory overtime to reconstruct their files instead of paying the $12,000 ransom.

How long would it take your staff to reconstruct three weeks of business data? Every transaction and every document, painstakingly recreated and restored. How much overtime would you pay? How much business would you lose?

There are several good reasons why cloud backups are worthwhile for almost any business. Ransomware is a big one. Automate the backup process and remove human error with a cloud backup solution.