With the modern work environment being set in most businesses now, the cloud is more critical than ever. When you think about it, with employees working remotely, how will they access their company’s database from anywhere in the world? The cloud is thus essential and powerful in today’s work environment.
Because of the capability of what the cloud can do, you don’t want anything to threaten your data in the cloud, particularly when you’re a business, so make sure your data that is backed up in the cloud is SECURE.
Before I get into secure data in the cloud, I’d like to discuss the importance of backup. Backup may sound like common sense and second nature, but businesses don’t realize how important backup is. 40-60% of small companies without a data recovery plan go out of business (PhoenixNAP) and 60% of businesses that lose their data shut down within six months (Nirico). Businesses are dependent on data, whether it’s data about the internal functions of their business or sensitive data about their clients, so you can imagine that businesses cannot exist without their data.
Before the existence of the cloud, you would think about copying your data to back it up in some physical location like your hard drive and/or your server, and that would be it. However, because your data is stored on some physical object, your data can be ruined or lost due to unfortunate natural occurrences, human error, security attacks, etc. Now that the cloud exists, it makes sense that you make another copy of your data to be backed up in the cloud.
Now that you have it backed up in the cloud, you have to think about best practices to ensure your data is secure in the cloud which should mostly involve testing and checking your backup:
- Is Your Data Organized? Not all of your data is highly important, so organize them in the manner of importance. This could mean that you have created a backup plan where your most important data like your clients’ sensitive data, i.e. account numbers, contact information, etc., should be backed up first.
- Is Everything Backed Up Properly? You can’t assume that your backup is working perfectly fine without checking, so be sure to test your backup – you wouldn’t want to find any surprising issues when your data gets compromised!
- Is Someone Monitoring Your Data? With your data in the cloud, you want to make sure it’s well monitored. This means making sure your data is not corrupted and everything is backed up properly. However, to really ensure you’re maximizing your cloud storage usage, you should work with a reliable technology solutions provider and cloud expert like Greystone who can help you when a disaster happens.
If you need a cloud backup plan, contact us here today, and we will be sure to help you.