Cloud Hosting vs Local Storage: What’s The Right Choice For You?

IT Solutions

You might not give it much thought from day to day, but the way you store and protect your business’ data is a fundamental decision. In the old days, pretty much everything your business needed would be held in physical filing systems, but modern companies can now use exceedingly efficient digital data storage methods.

However, in today’s digital age full of malicious cyber activity, it’s not enough to store your data in one place – it’s also vital to create regular backups of your valuable and sensitive data.

Why Is Digital Data Storage and Backup Important For Businesses?

Digital data storage provides several advantages to your business compared to using traditional physical filing methods. For starters, it can significantly boost operational efficiency – it’s far more organised and easily searchable, allowing your team to find the information they need exceptionally quickly, especially compared to paging through filing cabinets to find that one sheet of paper.

Automated filing processes also significantly take the legwork out of sorting and organising your files and data. Digital storage provides more efficient analytics, allowing you to easily compile and analyse data manually in programs like Excel or automatically use analytics software and AI tools.

Furthermore, digital storage enables access via remote workspaces and cloud applications. This means your team can access the data they need from wherever they’re working – which is a vital consideration in the recent mass migration to a remote workforce.

Most importantly, digital storage allows you to protect sensitive data effectively – you can password-protect or encrypt files to prevent unauthorised access, and firewalls, network security, and other cybersecurity measures can add a further layer of protection.

On top of this, digital storage allows you to create backups of all your files and data easily. This is essential, as data backups are critical for businesses for a whole host of reasons.

Why Are Data Backups Important For Businesses?

No matter how hard you try, there’s no 100% guarantee that your data will always remain safe and intact. Cyberattacks, system failures, or various other issues are all genuine risks to be seriously measured. Digital data backups enable your business to protect and recover its data in case of an emergency.

Preventive Measures Can’t Always Protect Your Data

This is the core reason your business needs a solid data backup and security strategy – no matter the preventive measures you have in place, there’s no guarantee your data will always be safe.

Firewalls, network security measures, and cybersecurity training for your employees may be enough to stop most cyberattacks. Still, there’s always a chance that one might be successful and put your data at risk. Other factors are out of your hands, like power outages, fires, and even natural disasters, all of which could take your systems offline and risk data loss.

Having a data backup strategy in place allows you to recover any data lost during a breach or other emergency, mitigating its impact and enabling your business to recover from setbacks quickly.

Failing To Back Up Can Leave You Open To Compliance Risks

In the event of a data breach, you may face investigation from regulatory bodies. They will assess whether you’ve taken the appropriate steps to protect your customers’ data – and if they find you haven’t, then they may impose costly fines or other penalties.

A robust backup strategy to prevent data loss is one way of demonstrating to regulatory authorities that you’ve planned for every eventuality and have measures in place to mitigate data loss. This can help regulatory bodies look more favourably on your business in the event of a breach, lessening the risk of fines and penalties.

Data Loss Can Lead To Reputation Damage

It’s not just compliance risks that could hurt your business’ bottom line in the event of a security incident. According to a 2020 Ponemon Institute study into the potential cost of a data breach, lost business due to reputational damage accounted for nearly 40% of the average total cost of a data breach – equating to an average of $1.52 million worth of lost business.

In other words, losing data means you lose the confidence of your customers and lose out on revenue as a result. Data backups allow you to recover lost data and mitigate the damage to your reputation by showing your customers you’re prepared and handling the breach effectively.

You Can’t Account For Human Error

According to OAIC, data breaches attributed to human error dominate cyber security statistics – meaning no matter how sophisticated your cybersecurity measures are, mistakes by your employees can still pose a risk to your data security.

Your team may fail to follow security procedures, install critical security updates, or fall victim to phishing or social engineering scams, all of which put your systems and data at risk from cybercriminals. Mistakes like these can easily lead to the accidental loss of data through data breaches, but having a data backup strategy in place means you can recover from these mistakes by restoring lost data quickly and efficiently.

Conclusion

Your business should give serious thought to the way it stores, protects and backs up data. Digital storage and data backups ensure that your business has efficient access to data while providing peace of mind knowing you can quickly recover valuable data if anything goes wrong.