How your enterprise backup solution could fail

In order to help businesses avoid a data disaster, Comport shared five things that can cause enterprise backup solutions to fail.

It's crucial for all companies to have a solution in place for recovery in the event of data loss, and doubly so for businesses at the enterprise level.

Listed below are five ways that an enterprise backup solution can fail. Companies that take the time to address these situations and better prepare themselves for the possibility of disaster will be much safer in the long run.

Inadequate security: 

One of the most common reasons why enterprise backup solutions fail is inadequate security.

Hacking attempts continue to be a real problem across nearly every industry, and enterprising cybercriminals routinely target mid-sized companies with valuable data and less stringent security protocols than larger corporations.

When handling sensitive data, it's important that companies realize that security is paramount. For many companies, keeping adequate protections with on-site storage and relying on that copy alone just isn't feasible.

Creating a solution with one copy on-premise and the other in the cloud, however, can create dual redundancy and give you the opportunity to leverage your cloud environment should something happen.

Human error:

At their core, all businesses are run by humans, and humans sometimes make mistakes.

Even the best-trained employees are prone to error, and unfortunately, sometimes those errors affect enterprise backups. In fact, nearly a quarter of failures are related to human error.

One of the best ways to address the human error factor is to ensure that there are redundancies in place to quickly recover in the event of a disaster.

Accidental deletion: 

A specific area of error that accounts for as much as 45% of data loss is accidental deletion.  It might not seem like this aspect should be a concern to companies that are careful about their data management, but all it takes is a simple mistake to delete a huge amount of data and bring business to a screeching halt.

Keeping data stored in the cloud in addition to physical storage may help address this issue, as data stored with these services is much easier to recover than files deleted off of the company's own servers.

Hardware failure: 

Companies that deal with a lot of data need infrastructure to support those files, and an unexpected crash of a server can leave a company with significant downtime, or even lead to total data loss.

Statistics show that 45% of data loss and downtime is due to hardware failure, so it's a real concern that businesses have to plan for.

Again, this is a situation where having off-site storage can save the day since enterprise cloud backup providers are experienced at data retrieval and recovery.

Only one backup: 

One overarching issue that encompasses all of the above points is the fact that as many as 85% of companies only have their data stored in one place. Having files in a single location can cause a lot of issues - especially if that location is on-site storage.

Even the biggest and most sophisticated corporations are vulnerable to a sophisticated cyber-attack.

Today's climate has also been unpredictable, bringing more natural disasters like the fires in California and the hurricanes in Florida, nature is unpredictable and can easily compromise physical data center storage.

Comport recommends that companies have at least three copies of their data - encompassing both storage at their physical location and data stored in the cloud.