Why You Need To Backup Cloud Data

Did you know Contingency Planning & Strategic Research Corp reported?that a whopping 96% of all corporate workstations are not backed up? This number is worrisome, considering data loss can significantly hurt a business. In recent years, cloud services have seen widespread acceptance from businesses and consumers alike as a solution to backing up business data.

While the cloud has many positives, like accessibility, dependability, and security, putting all of your confidence in the cloud to store sensitive information might be problematic. Cloud backups are not the end-all of data security; It is still possible for data to be lost, causing a calamity if you rely only on cloud services for data backups. This article discusses data protection beyond cloud backups with possible real-life circumstances.

The Impact Of Data Loss

Data loss isn’t something that businesses quickly or easily recover from. In fact, according to the University of Texas, 43% of businesses that experience a total loss of data never reopen, and 51% fail within two years. In addition, National Archives & Records Administration in Washington found that companies with a data center outage of 10 days or more saw a 93% bankruptcy filing rate within a year of the disaster.

While cloud storage is an impressive innovation, it's not wise to put all of your eggs in one technological basket if your data's safety could determine your company's fate.

What Could Go Wrong?

Human Error

Human error is inevitable. What if someone erases a former employee's account without transferring data to a new location? If you rely solely on the cloud for backups, that data could be lost forever.

On an even more serious note, Verizon found that human error was to blame for 82% of data breaches in its 2022 Data Breaches Investigations Report. That said, the security of your cloud data is only as good as the passwords you use to access it. If a user's password is hacked, you'll need a backup of that data.

Cyber Attacks

A growing number of instances of cloud security being breached have been reported. For example, security flaws in the cloud played a major role in a more recent 2019 incident at Capital One. Tens of millions of client records were leaked due to a vulnerability in the Amazon Web Services cloud and Capital One's difficulty in correctly deploying the complex cloud service.

Without other backups, you risk losing your data in the event of an incident in the cloud.

Outages

Outages are bound to happen. AWS suffered 27 outages in 2021, two occurring before the holidays. Google Cloud had an outage in mid-November of 2021 and March of 2022.

When there is an outage, you are dependent on the cloud vendor. Your downtime will be delayed until your cloud vendor can resolve the issue. The solution is out of your control, and you may be dealing with the problem for a few minutes or a few days. If you rely only on the cloud for backups, an outage could impact how long you go without having access to backups.

Conclusion: Don’t Rely On The Cloud For Backups

Many businesses across the world rely on cloud storage technologies for backups. Cloud, however, is susceptible to the same social engineering attacks and hidden software vulnerabilities that can give hackers back-door access to your data. Therefore, in the event of data loss, it is imperative that you have multiple backups on hand.

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