Causes of data loss
The vast majority – 78% in fact – of organisations experience some sort of data loss. The top three causes are, in order:
• Hardware failure, 40% – failure of hardware parts or whole units
• Human error, 29% – procedures, processes or mistakes
• Software corruption, 13% – failure of processes or whole systems
These figures are somewhat surprising, as many of us would anecdotally think that viruses / malware would be the primary cause. It is in fact hardware failure. And this can be parts as well as whole machine/unit. Some ~140,000 hard drives fail in the USA every week!
Therefore, it is important to not trust just one piece of equipment to store your data. And equally organisations should not entrust just one system with their data. Hardware can and will fail – this includes desktops, servers, network storage, laptops, external hard drives and USB memory sticks.
We recommend three layers of data at a minimum:
1. Your main data storage – e.g. a cloud service such as Office 365
2. Local copy of your main data – e.g. on an office server or your workstations
3. An external copy of your main data – e.g. on another cloud service or in another location
Most modern organisations make use of a mixture of cloud services and technologies, and for true 100% backup coverage custom processes can often be required. It is important to note all major cloud service providers do not guarantee the safety of your data – they guarantee the operation of their services to host your data, but if your data is corrupted or lost due to faults caused by your equipment and/or your users then they are not responsible.
We have recently implemented custom backup processes like this for several clients. For example, one organisation’s infrastructure incorporates Dropbox, Office 365 and AWS. We have developed a process to back up all cloud services three across a mixture of realtime sync, weekly copies, and monthly archives. This covers emails, contacts, calendars, all files and all folders across the whole team and organisation.
Contact us if you need a custom backup solution or see our Cloud Backup service for an unlimited quick plug-and-play solution for PC and Mac.
