Quite simply?
NO BACKUP
"When all else fails, your backup and disaster recovery system better be epic".
We live in a different world. It's changed significantly in the last four to five years in terms of cybersecurity - in fact before that we just called it "security".
Hacking used to be something that happened to big companies, banks and governments. Now it's happening to everyone. I don't know about you, but it bothers me, a lot, every day. It bothers me about my company, our customers and just the people I know. I feel I'm just waiting for someone to be hacked, or more likely, hit with ransomware.
There's barely a week goes by where someone, some company or, what's currently topical, some city is in the news as the result of a ransomware attack. The reason they get into the news is because they mostly end up having to pay the ransom. That's newsworthy and interesting.
Not so newsworthy and almost boring are the IT people who simply restore their organisation from backup. That doesn't seem to happen very often and in fact, it seems like most of the world doesn't have some decent backup. Or they did, but it was held right alongside their data that just got encrypted. Or they believed that replicating data in real-time to another site was backup, until all the newly encrypted files got replicated too. Oops.
In the IT industry, all things cyber are cool, sexy and interesting.
“Backup is boring, but it’ll save your neck”.
Backup? Boring. Speak to someone about backup and they often roll their eyes. Software to detect hackers? Cool.
Interestingly, the cost of a good backup system can be way less than the cost of cybersecurity software. The former is mature and well understood. The latter new, complex and constantly evolving. If you do these in the wrong order, it's a bit like buying an alarm system for your office before you bothered with doors, windows and locks.
Yet, when everyone's cyber systems fail to protect them (and it happens - see that comment about "complex" earlier), that last bastion of keeping you operating is your backup, every time.
Even when it's not cyber related, but just bad luck with hardware failing, or more common, human error - well, that's your backup coming to the rescue too.
Why then is there so little investment in something that's reliable, can save your company (and probably will) and costs a fraction per day compared to the revenue, profit and jobs it protects?
A good backup & DR solution needs to factor in the current cyber threat landscape. If the malware or hackers can get at your backup, it's game over. When it gets down to the crunch, you need something that's better than "good" - it better be EPIC. As a starting point, something that does local and cloud backups and you're doing them more frequently than overnight.
We're exhibiting at this year's Digit Expo with our Backup & DR partner, Datto, in Edinburgh on 7 November. We'll be talking about why we chose Datto out of the many others we researched and tested over several years. Datto will be demonstrating how quickly you can be back up and running after a data loss and how their technology can detect ransomware when other systems have perhaps missed it.
If you're going, we'd be delighted to discuss backup with you. If not and you're either intrigued or worried, give us a shout.
