Your data is your most valuable asset. In the first quarter of 2020, the average ransom payment for a data breach was $148,000, a 700% increase since the first quarter of 2019 according to Statistics Canada.
As the name would imply, ransomware attacks effectively kidnap your business’s data and hold it hostage until you make ransom payments to the criminal. Your data can have direct value to criminals like a credit card that they can use to extract funds. Or, the data can have indirect value, for example your online banking password, which can be used to access your accounts. In most cases, however, your data has no exact monetary value, but the confidential nature of the data makes it extremely valuable to criminals. Think of how much your business might pay to recover trade secrets, intellectual property, or internal communications.
Beyond cybercrime, the threat of physical disasters such as fires and floods makes a secure, reliable, and cost-effective data backup plan the most important element in any organization’s IT strategy.
Unfortunately, most organizations are unaware of the deficiencies in their data backup plan until they suffer the costs of a data breach, not only in terms of dollars, but labour hours, and reputation.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Do you know when your organization’s data was last backed up?
- What is the backup schedule?
- Are your backups tested?
- Do you receive reports from your provider following each backup?
- If your data were breached, how long would it take your organization to recover?
- How many hours of labour to restore your data?
- How many hours of downtime would you expect per employee? For your organization as a whole?
- How much would the breach cost your organization?
- In terms of lost-time and recovery labour?
- In terms of ransom payments?
- In terms of damage to your reputation among clients and suppliers?
If you or your IT service provider cannot provide a straight answer to any of these questions, you need to address your backup strategy immediately.
There are two typical approaches to a data backup strategy; (1) an on-premise solution; and (2) a public cloud solution. These approaches can be cost-prohibitive for smaller organizations, can create major cybersecurity issues, and can create customer service nightmares (for more on the limitations of these data backup strategies, see page 4 of our Backup as a Service e-Book).
At NeuStyle, we take a different approach to data backup that combines our expertise in IT service delivery, data centre management, and cybersecurity to deliver a cost-effective, reliable, and secure solution.
To learn more about how we can keep your data private and your business running, fill our the form below, or download our e-Book.