Let’s take your home for example… You might be there right now, reading this blog.
As you look around, think about everything that you own and about all the items that you cherish the most. Those items mean so much to you that to protect them by keeping them under lock and key. Further still, you may even have alarms and cameras installed.
You handle the items with care and with respect and you also trust others to do the same. Finally, to sleep easy, you invest in one extra level of protection… Home Insurance.
Why? Because the cost of not having it, isn’t worth thinking about! You are happy to pay for that peace of mind.
So, let’s put this into context:
Your business has servers (cloud hosted or on-premise). Inside it, you store all your most valuable data. Essentially, it has your whole business inside it. This data is so important that you keep it under digital lock and key: Firewalls, encryption, anti-virus protection and potentially a local backup. You also treat your business data with respect and care, expecting employees to do the same.
But unlike your home, you miss the final step… An insurance policy, your peace of mind, known as third-party cloud backup
You might be thinking it’s different to your home environment. Plus with all the best preventative measures in place, surely the chances of losing your critical data is low. Sadly, it isn’t. The risk isn’t just local, it’s global and can happen without you knowing. It can also happen within your business through human error – Accidental file deletions, or on purpose. This happens more often than you might think.
The risk might not be an employee, but a failing system, malfunction or error. By the time you’ve noticed, it’s too late. No problem, you have an onsite backup! However, that may have been infected, or maliciously tampered with or simply hasn’t been tested.
Viruses may seek to destroy your data. Malware would want to steal it. Ransomware will aim for your money. They all get through frailty in your defences.
It’s just like our example above. You secure you house with locked windows, locked doors, alarms and camera’s, but if someone is determined to get in, they’ll find a way. Usually by seeking out those weaknesses in your defence – Maybe a window being left open
This is why ransomware has increased dramatically through 2020 and is still on the rise now. Remote working means that cyber criminals leverage, unsecured home networks, and with no remote backup, it’s the perfect environment for ransomware and other viruses to thrive. The outcome is your data is lost, destroyed, stolen, or permanently encrypted.
Furthermore, your cloud hosted provider, such as Microsoft can’t help you either. It simply isn’t their responsibility, it’s yours. They are the Data Processor and it is their responsibility to maintain the environment that your data resides. You are the Data Controller and therefore, it is your responsibility to safeguard the data you manage… They state this in Microsoft’s Terms of Service – Section 6. Agreed, you can get your data back from the ‘Recycling Bin’, however, this is not a backup and is limited to a couple of months.
Also, Microsoft is (like any other business) susceptible to attack and system failures. In the last year Microsoft suffered outages that affected M365, preventing millions of users accessing their data. Although, these were short outages, the risks for businesses remain the same. Outages often occur by a cyber-attack, hardware malfunction, or major system failure. In any case, should you lose your data in the process, there may be no way of getting it back.
Microsoft is aware of this too. As part of their measures, they check to see how protected your data is on their servers. Surprisingly, their figures indicate that 80% of the organisations using their service have no third-party backup, meaning most organisations are risking their most valuable business assets – or to align it to our original example above, they have not taken out an insurance policy.
Data is becoming far more valuable and cyber criminals know this… You need the right third-party cloud-based, offsite, encrypted backup in the same way Home insurance will protect you and your most treasures belongings.
If this post has raised concerns, please get in touch with ClearYolk today.
