World Backup Day

… every day.

For nearly a decade, studies have shown that human error is the number one cause of data loss.  A 2007 study revealed that “user error” was the cause of at least half of all sensitive data losses, and deliberate or accidental policy violations caused another 25%.  In 2015, human error was still the number one cause of data loss at 24%.   The numbers are much higher if you include data breaches as data loss, which we have not done here.

So what does this mean for you?

The simple fact is that your data protection infrastructure can't be effective if your staff is untrained, unaware, or unwilling to follow procedures.  Employees interact with dozens of different systems in a network, and can accidentally create havoc on almost all of them just through everyday activities:

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… is everywhere.

It's an unfortunate reality that companies and individuals are still losing data to hardware failures.  Even companies that have regular backups can lose data if the right hardware fails at the right time.  Let's run through why hardware failures are still a problem and what you can do to protect yourself.

The Why

Let's face it;  one of the reasons we lose so much data to hardware failure is that we collect and store so much data.  There are a number of long-term trends that play into this, such as increased connectivity, lower storage costs, and the emergence of business intelligence and the technology that help companies collect and use data.  Regulations and other issues require some industries and government bodies to generate, store and transmit data in ways that generate more data.  Businesses and governments have so much data that document management services was a $5 billion industry as of November 2015.

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… can ruin everything.

There's a widely shared understanding that many businesses fail after a catastrophic data loss.  While not everyone can agree on the numbers, we can all agree that data loss is something to be avoided. 

Poor Security Practices

Most companies know that their data is important and they protect it by conducting data backups and restricting access through network credentials.  Beyond these steps, many companies only think of IT security as a means to remain in regulatory compliance or prevent data leaks.  This is an unfortunate gap in understanding how infrastructure security protects the company from data loss.  For example,

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… if you lost everything?

March 31 is World Backup Day, an annual reminder that data needs to be protected from things like malware, hardware failures, and human error.

Failure to backup

It's a simple concept, but one that is often overlooked: data can be lost quickly, easily, and without any fanfare or reason to notice that it's missing or inaccessible. Despite the importance of their data, many companies do not have a comprehensive backup strategy in place. This can be attributed to a handful of very human factors:

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