Could you get back your data if it were deleted?
A recent survey found that the majority of businesses that use cloud services think their data is automatically backed up because it is stored in the cloud, and were shocked when they found out that it wasn’t. There appears to be a lot of confusion about what happens when your data is put in the cloud with regards to the data being backed up.
And whilst cloud infrastructure, like Microsoft 365, has built in redundancy and resilience, it doesn’t mean your data sitting there has the same levels of protection, so we will go through how cloud infrastructure works and the resilience that makes people think the data is safe, confusing replicas of data with it being backed up.
But before we go into how cloud service resilience works, here is a quick question to ask yourself...
If you needed to get a file back that was deleted six weeks ago, would you be able to?
The bulk of responders said yes, but here's the crunch, when asked how, they couldn't answer, assuming the cloud provider would be able to restore their data, which is incorrect. Unless you are specifically paying for a backup, you won't have one.
Cloud infrastructure has built in resilience but not built in backups.
Microsoft owns a lot of data centres scattered around the world, so they can service their customers and also accommodate geopolitical legislation, such as GDPR that requires data to be stored within a geographic location.
Microsoft creates three working copies of your data with a primary, secondary and tertiary replica of your environments. If you use Microsoft 365 in your organisation, each person's email, data and shared data will be replicated between three data centres concurrently, it is all kept in sync. If something changes in the primary site, it is written to the secondary and tertiary sites simultaneously, keeping everything fully replicated and in sync.
If the primary data centre is knocked out, let say by fire, then one of the replica sites is promoted to primary, and a new tertiary site is spawned and brought into replication in a new data centre to ensure continued continuity.
As a user you'll be completely unaware that this is going on in the background, it is done automatically.
It is because of this resilience that a lot of people often mistake this protection as being a form of backup, but it isn't, it is just resilience to keep you working should a critical part of the cloud infrastructure stop working.
This replication and resilience of your data is just for current data though, if you were to delete some of your information, it is gone, if you were to want to get it back a few weeks later, there is very little you can do if you do not have a backup. Whist some data can be recovered from the recycle bin, if you are lucky, it is not a safe or reliable way to operate and a backup is the only way to ensure your data is safe.
Another misconception that there is a built in backup of your data is that you can go back to a previous version of your file because there is a feature in Microsoft 365 that allows you to roll back through previous versions of the file, however this doesn't work if your file is deleted or corrupted, especially if this goes unnoticed for a period of time. AND... this just applies to your files, NOT your email.
Last question to ask yourself, how long could you business keep going without any data, without your customer information and contact details, without any email, without your financial information including invoices and who owes your business money, how long could you keep going, be honest with yourself, after all it is your business that is impacted if you lose all your data.
This is why it is so important to have a regular backup, with the retention period that fulfils your needs. Not all data falls into the same requirements, some data needs to be protected for longer in some organisations, especially regulated industries, like financial services or child protection services.
Backups are REALLY cost affective, they are pennies per gigabyte and they can really save your business's bacon if there were ever a need to get data back. And it is not just data stored in the cloud, it is data that is critical to your business regardless of its location. You may store your data on a single computer, but is it protected and how often?
The Silver Cloud Business provides backup solutions that fit all businesses needs and requirements, if it is physical servers, with the need to be able to bring them online instantly in the event of a failure, or users' computers, or data in cloud services, including email and directory services, our backup solution can accommodate it all.
If you would like to find out how much a backup would cost your business, call us on 01722 411 999.