Survey Finds Data Protection Failures Come From Backup and Recovery Neglect

A recent survey conducted by Opinion Matters on behalf of GFI Software revealed some serious negligence in the area of data protection due to lax backup and recovery policies. But when you take a look at the reasons for neglecting backup and recovery, areas that everyone knows are best practices, it’s not hard to see why they’re getting short shrift.

“More than half (53%) of the organizations surveyed revealed they do not conduct daily backups. IT administrators indicated the biggest reason for not backing up data every day is that it’s not an efficient use of their time, according to nearly one-third (32%) of respondents. Some respondents – including 75% of those who work at organizations with 50-99 employees – said daily backups are disruptive to workplace productivity.”

Daily backups should not be disruptive to anyone’s productivity. They should happen quietly in the background, and they shouldn’t take up your valuable bandwidth that could be better spent on getting work done. If you have to spend a lot of time or bandwidth every day on backup, then you’ve picked the wrong backup solution.

“Other respondents suggested they do not conduct backups every day because they lack the resources, efficient technology or sufficient storage space.”

We feel passionately that everyone deserves to have unlimited storage space for their backups. Unlimited space – forever and always – means that there’s one less thing for you to monitor. Less monitoring is at the heart of any good data protection system.

“In order to protect critical information, companies need to regularly test their backup solutions to ensure they work properly. However, nearly one-third (32%) of IT administrators surveyed revealed their organizations do not conduct such tests.”

You should be able to check the status of your backups at a glance. You should be able to test the recovery mechanism in about 10 minutes per week. Again, if you can’t do these things, you need to re-evaluate your backup and recovery solution.

“Many IT administrators surveyed revealed that a failed backup has led to a loss of revenue and important company documents, including financial records, employee emails and confidential information such as social security numbers. As a result, respondents indicated that failed backups have affected customer relations, business operations and brand reputation.”

“Those respondents who indicated they were not able to recover data due to a failed backup cited loss of revenue and critical business documents as the biggest impacts on their business. Other IT admins said their organizations suffered the following consequences:

• The loss of data ‘caused weeks of problems with clients.’
• ‘We lost records pertinent to our organization that were unable to be duplicated and had to be reinvented.’
• The impact of the data loss was ‘…huge, in terms of meeting deadlines and productivity.’”

When you hear these types of stories about what can happen when you lose data, you HAVE to take the problem seriously. There are just no excuses for being negligent towards data protection.

Now, we realize that the words “backup and recovery” do not exactly conjure up images of Disneyland or rainbow-colored unicorns. They’re not associated with being fun, and they’ve traditionally been a pain in the neck with little return. But it has to be done if you want to keep your business up and running at all times.

Here at Spanning, we believe your backup and recovery solution should be intuitive, have unlimited storage and run in the background. We back up your Google Workspace users and data daily so that when disaster strikes, recovery is just a few clicks away.

You need a backup and recovery solution that won’t take up all of your time – and sanity. Try a 14-day free trial of Spanning Backup and see how data protection should be.