Does your office back up their cloud services or do they use cloud services as a backup for company files?
Most business owners understand the need to keep a current backup copy of all their files to prevent data loss, but when it comes to cloud storage services like OneDrive or Dropbox, they miss the boat and leave files at risk of deletion.
Backup and recovery applications are a vital part of any business continuity planning and prevent data loss due to everything from accidental deletion to ransomware and malware attacks.
But cloud services like Office 365, G Suite, Dropbox, and others that hold vital company data are often left out of a backup and recovery plan because companies mistakenly think their files in those services don’t need to be backed up separately.
But they do! Here are several reasons why.
Why Cloud Services Should Be Included in Your Backup Strategy
About 90% of all businesses use at least one cloud solution and an average of 60% of company workloads are cloud-based. That’s a lot of business data being stored in the cloud that might be at risk of loss if it’s not being backed up.
Here’s why you should ensure the data you store in cloud platforms is being backed up by a 3rd party backup tool.
Cloud Storage is NOT the Same as Cloud Backup
Cloud storage services like iCloud, OneDrive, and Dropbox are not backup solutions. Cloud backup platforms are designed to capture information at regular intervals and keep several backups of your information, based on the timing schedules you’ve set.
Cloud storage is more of a synching file storage system, meaning that files can get deleted and overwritten. For example, if you are synching files to a computer and then the hard drive crashes and deletes files, that could wipe out those files that were synced to cloud storage as well.
Another potential way files could inadvertently get deleted from a cloud service is when a user is deleted without transferring the files they own to another user. This can cause a deletion of those files, and in the case of Office 365, deleted files are only retained for 30 days before being completely purged.
Cloud Services Say to Back Up their Services
Providers of cloud services know the limitations of their platforms and many recommend that users back up their data held in a cloud platform or warn users that they’re on their own as far as service reliability.
For example, Microsoft states: “In the event of an outage, you may not be able to retrieve Your Content or Data that you’ve stored. We recommend that you regularly backup Your Content and Data that you store on the Services or store using Third-Party Apps and Services.”
In Google’s Terms of Service for Google Drive they don’t make any promises as to the safety of your data, stating “…we don’t make any commitments about the specific functionality available through Google Drive, its reliability, availability, or ability to meet your needs.”
Cloud Services Can (and Do) Experience Outages
Although it’s called a cloud or virtual server, the servers that a cloud service provider uses are physical servers just like any others. The difference is that they’re located away from your office and designed facilitate cloud-based applications where data can be accessed from anywhere through an internet connection.
Servers used by cloud service providers can also experience outages, drive crashes, and other events that can make it impossible for you to access your data for long periods of time and possibly result in permanent data loss from their system.
Gaps in Retention Policies
If you’re using a cloud-based email program, their policy for data retention may be shorter than you’d like, and if you haven’t backed up your emails separately, you could end up losing them as they hit the end of a data retention cycle.
Trying to keep track of all the email, message, and file retention policies in the various cloud services you use can be confusing. The best way to ensure the safety of your data is to back it up separately using a third-party backup solution.
Security Threats
Ransomware doesn’t only infect computers and networks at your office, it can also impact files synching to cloud storage services. That means in the case of a ransomware infection you could end up infecting your cloud files as well, leaving you without a recoverable backup unless you’ve separately backed up using a tool designed for backup and recovery.
Accidental or Malicious Deletion
Files in cloud services can be deleted by users, either by accident or maliciously. How many files someone could delete, depends upon their user permissions, but even if they’ve only deleted files that they have access to, that can still leave your business with unrecoverable work product or lost sensitive files.
Using a backup solution to back up your cloud services protects your files in the case of a user deleting a file or folder.
Start a Managed Backup Plan Today!
Managed services through Connect2Geek include ensuring all your files, wherever they reside, are backed up and easily recoverable when you need them.
Don’t wait for disaster to strike, schedule a free backup consultation today! Call 208-468-4323 or reach out online.