Data Backup Digest

It’s exciting to create your own business, build it from the ground up and see it expand over time. There’s lots of things to consider in the early stages that it can be very easy to overlook your data. Data is valuable to every single business, no matter the size. It can be the difference between securing a contract and losing it. Data can give you insight into your customers, help you predict market trends, and expand your network. As a start-up, you don’t want to ignore it.

While it’s one thing to understand the value of the data, it’s then another to back it up in the first place. Recent research from Beaming has shown that around 5.5 million businesses in the UK alone are at risk of losing critical data through bad backup solutions. Separately, research from Backup Vault found that 20% of sole traders don’t backup at all. Of those that do, only 50% have an off-site or cloud strategy.

Think about it now: if you lost all the digital data you’ve created and hold for your start-up, what impact would it have? I suspect a large one. It’s time to rectify that.

The common approach for individuals or small businesses is to use external hard drives. They are far from perfect, but they are affordable and easy for the average person to get to grips with. But they have lots of downsides. They are physical and can be damaged or stolen. And chances are you were thinking of storing that drive in the same location as your main data source – so what would happen if a fire broke out? You’d lose all the data.

A better approach for start-ups would be to consider cloud solutions. This means your data is stored off-site and you can benefit from the economies of scale that third-party providers can bring. You don’t have to concern yourself with software or hardware upgrades, you can store multiple versions of the data, and the security is likely to be far greater than you could ever achieve yourself.

Azure and Veeam are some of the big players – you probably want to go with an established company so that you can rely on the support and longevity of the platform. But shop around see what features are on offer and see what is affordable on your budget. Whatever you do, though, don’t skimp for the sake of pennies. The cost of losing your data or having to recover from it will be far greater than the cost of a backup solution.

You might also want to consider your internet connection and invest in fibre to ensure that your backups can regular, incremental and reliable. As you start generating more data – and big data is on the rise – you don’t want your backups to slow down and get slogged by poor internet speed.

Whatever solution you opt for, the main thing is that you have your data backed up. Your business cannot operate without its data. Know its value.