Thanks to Hallmark, there is a “Day” for just about anything, but here’s one that needs to be on your calendar!  World Backup Day is Sunday, March 31.  Whether for personal or business, this is a great reminder for you to celebrate awareness around having a backup and recovery strategy.

What is Back Up Day?
World Backup Day started in 2011 and is a day about backup awareness and getting people to start backing up their computers and data if they aren’t already doing so. The official date, March 31, was chosen to remind people to back up or risk losing data and becoming an April Fool.   Since then, World Backup Day has become a globally recognized holiday with annual conversations on the importance of backup.  Although widely publicized, there are still many who fail to back up their data.

Why Everyone Should Backup

  • Data loss can happen any time
    Crashes, malware, physical damage or failure, theft, or basic user error. Data loss can happen for a number of reasons. Laptops make you particularly vulnerable – they can be damaged or stolen, especially while traveling. Incremental backups allow you to restore either specific files or your entire system easily.
  • Monetary Loss
    The industry average cost of IT downtime is dependent on a lot of areas. The monetary losses vary when you consider your revenue, industry, the actual duration of the outage, the number of people impacted, the time of day, etc. For example, losses are significantly higher per hour for businesses who are based on high-level data transactions, like banks and online retail sales. If you experience an unplanned outage during peak traffic time, obviously the damage will be more significant. According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute.
  • Loss of Time
    If you have a data loss, you will have to work to fix it. This might be just having to rewrite an important email because your computer crashed right before you hit sent, or as serious as rebuilding your entire client database. While you or your employees are working on data recovery, you are not working on the core of your business.

Best Backup Options
One of the safest, most affordable options to keeping your data safe is backing up to the cloud.  A smart alternative to storing data on your office computers or tape drives, the cloud offers many benefits:

  • Affordability – No expensive equipment to purchase or install. You also don’t have to deal with routine maintenance or repairs.
  • Ease of Use – No hours of training needed! One set up, you just need to decide how often data will be saved.  Whether it’s hourly, weekly or any other interval you need, the rest is done automatically from that point on.
  • Scalability – Cloud backup easily grows and evolves with your business.
  • Speed – Accessing data in the cloud takes only a few minutes, recovering data following a loss is equally fast and efficient.

Need Help?  Contact Us
If you need to know more about backing up your company’s data, contact BMT.  We’re specialists in providing cloud data backup and recovery services designed to keep you ready for any type of disaster you might face.  With over 25 years’ experience, our IT experts can help you easily make the transition to saving your data to the cloud.