What Is Backup Data Management Anyway?

IT managers who are migrating — or already have migrated — to a cloud-based service like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace will also need to weigh if adding a backup data management service is beneficial to their business.

Borrowing storage space from companies like Microsoft and Google comes with some limitations in data protection, which you as an IT expert are expected to understand, and then fill the gaps in coverage for itself. But this is not always easy.

Why Consider Data Backup Management?

From contacts to emails to personally identifiable information about clients – businesses trust cloud-based services like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 for business-critical data. Has your IT team considered what would happen if your cloud provider’s server crashed or malfunctioned?

All of your work could potentially be lost, or temporarily inaccessible.

For example, in 2015, lightning struck a Google data center in Belgium. As a result of power failure from the incident, Google reported that about 5% of the persistent disks in the zone saw at least one failure, and some customer data was lost permanently.

More recently, in September of 2020, Microsoft was the target of suspected malicious activity, which caused massive outages on its applications like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Sharepoint, OneDrive, and Azure.

During the outage, a percentage of Microsoft users were unable to access business-critical applications for up to five hours, resulting in lost productivity, revenue, and time.

In addition to potential catastrophes at SaaS data centers themselves, businesses must also be aware of the shared responsibility model, which states that businesses using Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 are responsible for protecting their data against accidental deletion hackers, malicious insiders, and ransomware attacks:

• Human error – Human error is one of the leading causes of data deletion or diminished data integrity in today’s workplace. And, it can happen in industries within any sector. For example, in 2017, IT service management company GitHub suffered from a major outage after a developer accidentally deleted a primary database thinking it was a secondary database.
• Insider threats – An insider threat occurs when someone within an organization —with authorized access — misuses their power to negatively impact an organization’s critical information or systems. Insider threats have been a growing concern for the last several years, with more than 34% of businesses around the globe affected by insider threats each year.
• Ransomware attacks – Industries like education, government, energy, and healthcare are all highly susceptible to ransomware attacks. During a ransomware attack, your data, business reputation, and finances are on the line. Think back to 2017, when the WannaCry ransomware attack infected more than 230,000 computers in 150 countries, demanding ransom payments before releasing control of data.

From natural disasters to internal threats, the number of data vulnerabilities in our modern technological world are abundant and unpredictable.

And, despite how an interruption occurs, without a data backup plan, the end results are the same:

• Lost business data resulting in lost productivity
• Tarnished business reputation
• Compliance and regulatory failures and fines

By adding a data backup plan to your overall technology strategy, you can ensure that no matter what unforeseen event happens to your business or cloud provider, you have a copy of accurate data, easily accessible when you need it, to mitigate downtime, protect your business reputation, and protect your clients.

Backupify for Your Business

Backupify aims to bring peace of mind to IT managers across all industries by making sure their business-critical data is protected from corruption and loss.

Backupify’s third-party data backup and protection service guards you against power outages, failed third-party integrations, human error, malicious employees, and ransomware attacks by providing automatic backups to your data three times a day. (Or manually at any cadence you wish.)

So, if an incident occurs, you can recover your lost files and folders, folder structures, and permissions quickly and easily.

Try Backupify free for 15 days to see how easy it can be to protect your Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 data.

Not ready for a trial? Learn more about Backupify and the importance of cloud-to-cloud backup.