For many business owners and IT professionals alike, backups are seen as something of a necessary evil. Something that is supposed to save you a lot of time, money and energy in the event of a disaster sure does require a lot of time, money and energy to get off the ground properly, doesn’t it? However, the people out there who understand the true purpose of backups likely don’t share these sentiments. Anyone who thinks that backups are JUST so that you have a copy of a file that you can use in case you lose the original are missing a much bigger picture.
It’s About Business Continuity
Make no mistake: the ability to restore via backups is hugely important. If Tim from Accounting accidentally deletes that big project that you’re just days away from turning in, you can restore everything instantly and keep moving. If one of your workstations is affected by a virus (or worse – hit by a dreaded ransomware attack), you stand a much better chance at keep productivity flowing if you have well-kept, well-maintained and well-monitored backups to return to in your time of need.
However, the real purpose of backups is something much larger and infinitely more important: business continuity. You aren’t creating backups just so you can restore files – you’re creating backups so that your employees can keep working, no matter what happens.
Investing in a rich backup solution that doesn’t just duplicate your files but secures them, monitors them and keeps them out of harm’s way is an investment in your company’s future. Ultimately, the most expensive workstation or business laptop in the world won’t mean anything if it doesn’t have a stable architecture of files that you can use to build from.
To return to the idea of a ransomware attack, consider what would happen if you suddenly booted up a workstation one day only to find that your hard drive was encrypted. What’s worse, you were being asked to pay thousands of dollars just for the possibility of regaining access to those all important files. You could pay the fine and hope for the best or, if you had backups, you could restore the system to its original state and hit the ground running.
Losing files in this way doesn’t just represent kilobytes disappearing. It represents the amount of time and energy your employees put into creating the intellectual property in those files that you’ll never get back. It represents all of the hard work they’ve done building something that you’ll never get paid for because you’ll never be able to turn it into the client.
Backups avoid all of this entirely. They’re less a safety net and more a tool to protect your entire infrastructure from harm, regardless of the form that harm happens to take. Physical threats (like hard drive failure), virtual threads (like viruses), cloud-based issues, application vulnerabilities, server malfunctions and obsolete workstations all stand to seriously derail what it is you’re trying to accomplish.
Unless you’ve been religiously backing everything up, that is. In that case, you likely don’t have a care in the world because you know that business continuity is being actively maintained at all times.
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