Data Backup Strategies for Small and Midsized Businesses

Summary: Small and midsized businesses (SMBs) must have a data protection policy and plan in place before a data disaster happens. Preparation can help ensure business continuity and productivity after data loss from cyberattacks, building disasters, human error and equipment failures. Being able to quickly restore data after an event can make recovery possible.

What Is Data Recovery?

Nobody enjoys planning for the unexpected. Often, we put off planning for unforeseen events until confronted with one. By then, it is too late for planning. For SMBs, a lack of proper planning increases the likelihood of losing the company’s business-critical data to hardware failures, natural disasters and cyberattacks. For businesses to thrive, they must have a plan for protecting, saving and recovering data in the event of emergencies.

Why Backup Business Data?

When data is lost due to human error, cyberattack, building disaster or hardware failure, the situation is chaotic. Panic and worry take over. Having a data protection and recovery plan in place that includes frequent tested data backups will ensure that your business productivity can resume, taxes can be filed and clients are happy.

Data recovery is “a process of retrieving deleted, inaccessible, lost, corrupted, damaged, or formatted data from secondary storage, removable media, or files when the data stored in them cannot be accessed in a usual way. The data is most often salvaged from storage media such as internal or external hard disk drives, solid-state drives, USB flash drives, magnetic tapes, CDs, DVDs RAID subsystems and other electronic devices.”

What if You Lost All Your Data?

For many companies, their data is their most valuable asset. Without access to their data, many companies would be unable to operate. Unfortunately, cybercrime has increased by over 400% post-pandemic and hackers' primary goals are to breach valuable data to sell it or exploit it. In addition to halting business operations, a data breach can affect clients, employees and connected vendors. Once a hacker has access to your system, everyone connected to your company network is at risk, and your business faces legal liability for every record breached.

6 Essential Data Backup Strategies

Even if your SMB is not attacked, data corruption without a backup can have disastrous consequences. Imagine filing taxes without access to your data? Quickly regaining access to compromised data due to ransomware attacks, sabotage, errors or file corruption is critical to minimizing damages. Fortunately, there are some steps you can take to protect your SMB data:

• Define Your Data Threats – Beyond cyberattacks, businesses must be prepared for all forms of emergencies, including fires, natural disasters, power outages, human error, and more. By identifying the threats, planning for data recovery will be more comprehensive.
• Install Robust Security Protection – The goal of cyber security is to detect, mitigate and stop cyberattacks. Make sure you have professional antivirus software with live SOC monitoring (not the free stuff that comes on your computer). By having a data recovery plan in place, when data breaches occur, you will be in a better position to reduce the damage, eliminate the threat and restore your data for full functionality. (A cyber security professional should clear malware from your system before reloading data.)
• Identify The Data Most Critical to Operating Your Business – For a data recovery plan to be most effective, SMBs should prioritize the data in order of which data segments are most critical for continuing company operations. By understanding the relative importance of each category of your business data, you will be able to prioritize the order of recovery.
• Set Plans and Goals for Your Data Recovery – By knowing which company data is most valuable, you can then calculate recovery point objectives or RPO. RPOs are calculations of the maximum amount of crucial data your SMB can afford to lose. Also, recovery plans should set recovery time objectives or RTOs. By setting goals and prioritizing data SMB management can better plan data backups and perform restoration as quickly as possible.
• Test And Update Your Data Recovery Plan – To know whether your recovery plan is viable, it should be tested to identify any gaps. Also, data recovery plans are not “one and done.” Recovery plans must be fluid, evolving with the company’s growth and evolving to protect against new threats and address the ever-changing target landscape of cyber criminals. In addition, regular IT support maintenance services and hardware contingencies should be included in your plan. Planning and policies are key, but failing software, hardware and network connections must also be addressed. The more detailed the plan, the smoother and faster the data recovery will be.
• Design A Company Data Protection Policy – Data protection best practices are a company-wide responsibility. All employees must be on the same page concerning the proper handling of company data and what to do when the company suffers a data-related event. By creating and updating the data protection policy, all your employees will know how they can best support your company’s data protection.

A Data Backup and Recovery Plan Ensures Business Continuity

Creating a comprehensive data protection and recovery plan is well worth the upfront time and effort. Backing up business data will enable you to safely ignore ransomware demands or calmly restore data after a data loss event. Without a tested backup, you may not be able to restore data and may need to re-create data from scratch, if possible. If a cyberattack or emergency puts your data at risk, having a plan in place will help identify potential data threats in advance. With careful preparation you can protect your SMB from crippling data losses and work with your IT professional to restore data and quickly get your company back to full operations.