Reset & Thrive Your Business (06) - Why Today’s Remote Workforces Need Advanced Data Backup

This blog is the sixth piece in our Reset & Thrive blog and webinar series, all of which can be viewed here:

1. Reset & Thrive – What’s Next?
2. Reset & Thrive – Planning Your Digital Transformation
3. Reset & Thrive - Getting Your Remote Workplace Strategy Implemented
4. Reset & Thrive - Maintaining the Remote Workplace Environment You Created
5. Reset & Thrive – How to Reduce Security Risks in the Future
6. Reset & Thrive - Why Future Remote Workforces Need Advanced Data Backup
7. Reset & Thrive - How HR can Facilitate Agile Work
8. Webinar Recap: The Remote Working Reset

Most businesses have finally settled into the groove of conducting business through online channels after COVID-19 prompted the sudden shift to remote work. Today, surveys have found that an impressive 80 percent of employees around the world are working remotely for at least half of the week, while only 3.8 percent of the workforce in the US was remote as of 2018. This represents a stark increase in the average business’s reliance on data, or more specific in making data available so people can work as productively remotely as they used in the office

Before 2020, many businesses relied on digital solutions but didn’t conduct their business entirely online. Now, their communications, financial statements, productivity platforms, and IT infrastructure are absolutely essential to getting any work done at all. With so much of your organization relying on data, it’s important to have a plan for securing your data before an unfortunate event such as a malicious attack or accidental deletion takes place.

If your organization still has a rudimentary back-up solution, or no clear backup plans at all, it’s not too late to get started. Let’s look at why regular, convenient data backup is crucial for today’s remote workforces.

The shift to remote work might have happened quickly, and you may not have even thought of securing your data in the interest of immediately implementing business-critical tools. That’s understandable since digital transformation suddenly became mission critical. But you can’t use those critical tools if the data that powers them goes missing – and if the data goes missing, it can be damaging to your reputation and cause a loss in productivity across your remote working teams. Additionally, the sudden shift to remote work forced some organizations to move their data to the cloud. Before doing so it was common practice for many employees to work on business documents that were protected on special file systems or in an on-premise exchange environment. Now, with the increased usage of the cloud, sensitive assets are at a higher risk.

When businesses lose data, it can take a lot of time – hours, sometimes even days – to recover it. In some cases, businesses expend a lot of effort trying to reclaim data only to find that it cannot be recovered which can be devastating to their organizations. Here are a few unfortunate scenarios from businesses who didn’t take the time to back up their data.

• A user’s M365 license expired causing them to lose their Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint account – as well as all the data inside it.
• A ransomware attack took place across several crucial SharePoint and OneDrive accounts, where files were copied and encrypted by cybercriminals who demanded a large payment to regain access.
• Malicious deletion where a disgruntled employee deleted large volumes of essential company data.
• Accidental deletion where a well-meaning user accidentally deleted data from his Mailbox, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online.
• Hybrid solution challenges where rudimentary data backup solutions fell short. With some data being stored in the cloud and some in on-premises solutions, a company overlooked entire sets of crucial data with their backup strategy.

Don’t trust that inherent backup tools in programs like Office 365 will provide the capabilities your business needs. Although some offerings will offer basic backup capabilities, they’re not always as thorough as you need them to be and speaking with an expert to resolve your problems can be difficult.

To put it simply, there’s no better time than the present to start with data backups and no worse time than after you’ve already experienced significant data loss. Backing up your data is part of preparing for the future – it’s crucial to protecting the ways your employees connect, collaborate, and communicate. We recommend backing up your solutions in this order:

• Critical or high-value data – Malicious actors tend to go for this data first since they know your business will suffer a sizable setback if it is deleted.
• Financial, customer, and employee information – Again, these documents are a target for malicious actors since they can be leveraged to damage your business’s reputation, or severely hinder your ability to work.
• Proprietary and confidential information – Having this information stolen or deleted will not necessarily impact your reputation or ability to work, but it could be difficult to replace and could be used for nefarious purposes.
• Employee work documents – Having employee work documents locked down could bring whole departments within your organization to a standstill, and having it deleted can waste hundreds of labor hours depending on the size of your business.
• Company information and process documents – While your organization can likely carry on without this information handy, remaking these documents can be a costly endeavor if they are deleted.

After you’ve sorted your data based on priority, think about how often you’d like to back it up. Generally, it’s recommended to back up critical data every time it is altered while less critical information should be backed up on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis.

If your business relies on technology on a day-to-day basis, protecting your data is essential. While security measures go a long way in this regard, with so many employees working online, it’s inevitable that some data will be lost at some point. Restoring that data is the primary benefit of a backup solution. However, not every data backup solution is created equally so look for a solution that can offer you the following benefits.

• Simplified backup – A good backup solution should automatically detect, compress and deduplicate your various sources of backup. It should also provide an easy way to manage your on-premises, hybrid, and cloud platforms to gain an easy and accurate 360º overview of your backed-up data.
• Optimized operational costs – Your solution should offer consolidation on backup solutions, which will lower training costs and reduce unnecessary maintenance and support contracts.
• Improved security – By offering full transparency about the status of all backup jobs between public cloud and hybrid environments you’ll know what data is protected and what data requires additional security measures.

Unfortunately, many solutions with inherent backup capabilities do not offer these benefits. Don’t settle for a solution that won’t give your team a high degree of confidence that their data is safe and protected – if you ever experience accidental or malicious deletion, an advanced backup solution will prove its worth many times over.

Data backup is essential to securing your remote workforce. Even if you haven’t experienced a potentially disastrous deletion event yet, it’s comforting to know you’ll always have a way to bring your data back if it’s deleted.

If you’re searching for an effective backup solution that will keep your data safe, consider BackupSimple from SoftwareONE. It centralizes all of your backup needs into a single location to give your organization comprehensive and streamlined data recovery, and provides a scalable, resilient, and secure platform that lets your team easily control your data backup processes. Our solution is designed to give your team peace of mind – and in this unpredictable time, peace of mind has a value that can’t be overstated.