In The Spotlight – Backups

Backups – where to start? You see, the thing with backups is they’re not glamorous – actually, you might never even look at them until you need them – but when you do, you have to be sure they’re in place and working as they should be. Backups are essential for any business for one key reason: if something goes wrong with your data, backups are your only remaining line of defence. Let’s imagine a scenario to help us understand this. 

It’s a Friday afternoon, the end of a productive week. Your team have made some great progress updating your documentation, adding to your processes library, improving the way you do things, and recording these improvements to be shared with all their colleagues. On top of that, you have updated all your customer contracts, revising any changed addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, and storing a copy in your database. It’s great to have this important information refreshed, and you can go home that evening looking forward to more efficiency in the weeks ahead as a result of all your work. 

Fast forward to Monday morning, the start of a new week. You’re in the office early to plan for the next improvement you want to tackle. You log in to your machine and go to have another review of the previous week’s progress. Strangely, you cannot seem to access the first folder you click on. You click on another, same thing. Another, same thing. Now you try an individual file, and suddenly a message pops up on your screen: “YOU HAVE BEEN RANSOMWARED. PAY NZ$500,000 TO THIS BITCOIN ADDRESS TO REGAIN ACCESS TO YOUR DATA.” It would be a stomach-churning feeling. Quickly, you’ll realise that some way, somehow your data is no longer yours. That means your customer data is now exposed, potentially being auctioned off to the highest bidder but at the very least, out in the public domain. You need a way of becoming operational again – your data cannot be salvaged in its current form – and then you’ll need to deal with the fallout. You need to have a backup, that is working and tested, from a recent date, that you can go back to. Without one, your data is as good as lost. 

As you can see, backups are such an important thing to invest in and can save you so much time and money in the event of an emergency. 

Here’s how backups work: 

1. They take a copy of your data at a point in time – say 8pm, every day 

 2. They save that copy to another location, usually an offsite one or better yet, a secured cloud location 

 3. That copy is retained for a period of time, while also being added to each new day with any new information 

 4. The backups (hopefully) get tested in a restore simulation process, where you run a drill of the above scenario and establish how quickly you can retrieve a backup 

 5. They provide peace of mind and a safety net for any of the myriad scenarios that exist today which could cost you access to your data 

Now, some of you may be thinking what other businesses fall into the trap of: “I won’t get breached, my business is too small,” or “Ha I know how to stay secure and keep my data safe.” Well, here are some of the numbers, Varonis (NASDAQ listed data security firm headquartered in New York) is reporting that 46% of major cyberattacks reported in the year to date were suffered by organisations with fewer than 1000 people. On top of that, mid-year reporting from combined Deloitte teams in the US and Europe shows that a major cyberattack today costs, on average, US$1.85 million, and that two in three firms they surveyed had suffered a breach of some description in the previous twelve months. To find out more about this, read our article on how to respond to a cybersecurity incident. 

Some further context to these stats is that not every ransomware attack is carefully targeted. Some are, but some take a deliberate at-scale scattergun approach, picking off anyone in its path with no great focus. So actually, you can be the most careful person in the world and only be a one-person business, and get into the crosshairs of a random attack and still lose all your data. It is essential to realise that there is no security through obscurity, no safety in (a lack of) numbers. Security risks do not discriminate – you must be proactive, and systems to be reactive too. 

So backups, as you can see, are an unsung hero in the IT world. You don’t realise they’re there, plugging away, giving you a safety net in case the worst happens, but if it does, you are ready to get back up and running. If you don’t have a backup solution in place we highly recommend you give some thought to investing in one.