The Importance of Offsite Backups for SMBs
By definition, an offsite backup is a method of digital data backup involving the use of a remote location as a means of securing data in the event of a disaster. Modern data backup employs the cloud, where a data copy is sent over a network to an offsite server. While a large enterprise may own the server, small and medium businesses (SMBs) use a third-party cloud service provider as the host. According to recent reports, cloud adoption for data backup in Canada hovers around at 73% of businesses.
Canadian spending on cloud infrastructure is forecast to grow by 77% over the next three years, but smaller businesses are expected to comprise under 10% of that spending share. Given that smaller businesses are more vulnerable and less likely to bounce back after IT disasters, this needs to change. It’s time for your small business to adopt offsite backups. Here’s why.
Protection Against Cyber Crime
Over the past year, cyber attacks on SMBs have reached epidemic proportions. Cyber criminals are no longer focused solely on government agencies, financial institutions, and large enterprises.
The Globe & Mail reports an explosion of occurrences of ransomware in the SMB/ SME sector. Ransomware is malicious software that blocks organizations from accessing their own data and IT systems until a ransom is paid. If you are not willing to pay the ransom and/or don’t have the funds, your onsite data will be lost. You may be forced to cease operations, and you may be required to pay compliance fines and be subject to liability claims should the data not be retrievable. By adopting offsite backups in the cloud, you effectively take the power away from cyber criminals.
Protection Against Natural Disasters
Canada’s financial toll for dealing with natural disasters is approximately half a billion dollars per annum, and data shows that our country is one of the worst affected by climate change. It’s real, as are the natural disasters to come. Weather events are responsible for knocking out power grids and disrupting IT systems on a major scale. Lightning, floods, extreme winds, or wildfires can do more than damage a brick and mortar space, they can obliterate your onsite data within seconds. SMBs without an offsite backup are about as vulnerable as a straw house in a tornado.
Offsite backups will provide your business with essential protection from downtime during and following an impactful weather event, affording you access to data and applications needed to maintain some semblance of operations.
Protect Against Logical Data Disasters in RAID-dependent or Networked Systems
Cyber crime and natural disasters garner all the mainstream press. While those threats to your data must be taken very seriously, it’s actually logical data disasters in RAID-dependent or networked systems that result in data loss for most commercial organizations. Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks or Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) is purported to be a solution that increases the performance and reliability of data storage. The varying nature of RAID systems come with a number of disadvantages. Some are not fault-tolerant, meaning if one drive fails, all data in the RAID array is lost. Many also have limited storage capacity and are a relatively unscalable solution to creating redundancy of data. Raid-dependent and networked systems as a whole are susceptible to user error, software error, and viruses. In the end, they are no substitute for offsite backups.
Housed exclusively in Canada, SIRKit hosts data and critical services using a powerful and private cloud Server to protect your on-premise servers. Our cloud server is resilient to the threats addressed above, allowing your data to be protected by fire suppression, backup generators, security guards, line conditioning, and redundant cooling. It is lightning fast, powerful, and built to scale, and offers redundancy to provide high-availability and automatic fail-over. Our services are backed up with a 99.9% uptime guarantee!
SIRKit offers state-of-the-art offsite backup from our Edmonton AB facility. Contact us today to discuss your solution along with any other Managed IT support needs.