Today in our digital world your business data = your currency. Yet, data backup and continuity solutions are still a hard sell. Business owners who do not understand the danger just see another monthly IT expense without any immediate visible ROI.
The Data Download
The perception gap around the risk of data loss is troubling – 89% of MSPs are “highly concerned” about a ransomware threat, but two-thirds of small business decision-makers do not believe they will be targeted by attacks.
A backup should be thought of like insurance for business data – if the worst happens, continuity solutions help reverse the loss to recover data as quickly as possible.
Data is valuable – and not just for its resale value.
The idea you are too small to be targeted and do not have data anyone would want needs to be put to rest. The idea is far from true. ALL businesses generate valuable data every day — from credit card numbers to customer and employee personal identifiable information (PII). These items can fetch a large price on the black market, not to mention sales and financial information and proprietary IP all of which competitors would be eager to get their hands on.
With ransomware, attackers do not even need to monetize stolen data. They just need the data to be worth enough to you to pay to get it back. In fact, 58% of businesses who paid a ransom in the last 12 months, did so because the cost of the ransom was less than the cost of lost productivity from downtime!
Data is vulnerable. From bad people, but also from your people.
There are so many threats to data out there. Malicious attacks such as ransomware and phishing have been rapidly increasing in volume and sophistication, but data is at risk from other sources as well.
In fact, user error (i.e., employees) is the #1 cause of data loss, whether it is someone mistakenly overwriting a document or a well-intentioned departing employee trying to “clean” their file systems before leaving. Hardware failure, lost or stolen devices, natural disasters, and power outages are also ways data can be lost, damaged, or corrupted.
Remote work exposes data vulnerabilities.
The 2020 surge in remote work left many scrambling to enable remote productivity within quick turnarounds. Remote work inherently poses more security challenges as employees work outside the safety of the corporate firewall, connecting to company resources on multiple devices via insecure home networks.
The rush to roll out remote work solutions inevitably left some of these security vulnerabilities exposed – which coincided with a rapid increase in cyberattacks as cybercriminals hurried to exploit the pandemic. By mid-2020, the FBI reported cyberattack complaints were up by 400%, Microsoft reported pandemic-themed phishing and social engineering attacks jumped by 10,000 a day, and cybersecurity experts reported ransomware attacks were up by 800%.
The double whammy of a weakened security posture colliding with a flood of cyberattacks brought the consequences of data loss home to many companies. In fact, in a 2020 report from Malwarebytes, 24% of surveyed IT leaders said they paid unexpected costs to address a cyber breach or attack following the move to remote work in March.
2020 has changed the “new normal” of work forever, and remote work is not going anywhere. Businesses must find ways to protect company data while empowering remote work, making backup and continuity solutions key components of modern remote work strategies.
The consequences hurt beyond the financial cost.
The most obvious impacts of data loss are calculated in time and money. How long can your business tolerate downtime due to data loss before facing consequences such as lost sales, angry customers, or compromised PII.
Business owners and managers were surveyed about the impact of an outage, 54% of businesses reported a loss of customer confidence, 38% reported damage to brand integrity, and 37% reported a loss of employee confidence.
The stats vary, but it is estimated that unplanned downtime can cost between $926 and $17,244 per minute — and with 40% of surveyed SMBs saying they experienced 8 or more hours of downtime due to a severe security breach in the past year, those dollars add up fast.
There are other costs to consider as well, including tarnished company and brand reputation, weakened employee morale, the threat of legal action, and compliance fines and penalties.
It can happen to anyone — and stats indicate it WILL happen to you.
Truth is based on statistical likelihood; most small businesses will experience a cyberattack or major data loss at some point.
No security solution is 100% foolproof — and as we established, a lot of data loss is not malicious, but accidental. Backups and continuity solutions are so critical for modern businesses as a last line of defense to protect data and become more cyber resilient.