Data Recovery Digest

The number of cyber threats against businesses globally has continued to increase. Ransomware attacks in particular are on the rise, since they’ve proven to be so effective at locking companies out of their data and extorting them for money.

It’s why it’s so important that every single organisation, and all those people involved in the IT within, are confident in the backup and recovery systems that are in place and would know how to effectively use them should disaster strike.

However, a new survey conducted by Databarracks, a business continuity company, polled 400 IT decision-makers and found that only 35% of UK businesses have complete confidence in their existing disaster recovery plans.

Databarracks conduct this survey every year and they’ve found that there hasn’t been much progress in disaster recovery and backup confidence, despite the number of threats growing.

8% of respondents said that they had concerns about their disaster recovery plans, while 53% said they were fairly confident. Of course, what’s really needed is complete confidence – there’s no point leaving anything to chance. Interestingly, 49% only have complete confidence in their backup capabilities – which is a vital component when it comes to business and data continuity.

“Organisations are lacking something in terms of disaster recovery strategy, and the policies, procedures and technology needed to execute this strategy,” said Peter Groucutt, managing director of Databarracks. “It’s hard to function confidently as a business if you’re unsure how well you’d cope if disaster struck – whether that’s cyber-related or something else, such as a power outage.”

You don’t have a good backup plan if all the copies of your data are stored in the same place. Something like a natural disaster, say a flood or fire, would wipe it all out in one go. The survey found that 23% of respondents do not have offsite backup, which is unacceptable.

It also found that 13% never test their backups and 42% haven’t tested the disaster recovery process in the last year. It’s all well and good thinking you have good backups and plans, but you don’t know that for sure unless you put them under the microscope and test it. It doesn’t have to be an expensive or time intensive process – it’s about improving resilience and protecting against something worse.

Testing should become part of standard operations so that staff are prepared and ready for any eventuality. Consider how your business would resolve all sorts of problems – a network outage, data corruption, backup failure, and so on.

Considering that 24% of respondents said their biggest concern about a disaster is lost revenue, and 17% said reputational damage, that just highlights the importance of testing. You can avoid both lost money and reputation by resolving things quickly and effectively.

While cyber attacks have increased from 12% to 17% in a year, data loss from hardware failure dropped from 27% to 23% and from human error dropped from 26% to 21%. This shows that employees are getting better education on how to protect themselves and their data from loss, but there’s still a way to go.