Is Your Company Prepared for Large-Scale Data Loss?

According to a University of Texas study, 94 percent of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss don’t survive. While no recent statistics are available, historically, smaller businesses are even more likely to close. Cybercrime is the primary culprit for these data losses, with Statista finding that over 82 percent of companies worldwide were affected by ransomware attacks. 

That explains why Statista also projected the cybersecurity market would reach $166 billion last year. Implementing cybersecurity best practices is crucial to preventing data loss. Ensuring data recovery is the key to operational resilience.  

Data Protection Strategies: Prepare and Plan for Recovery

Given the statistics, it’s a matter of if and not when you will suffer some form of attack. And, given that cybercrime usually involves data loss, data backups —and immutable storage — are vital to ensure you can recover. However, your solutions should be part of a comprehensive business continuity and cybersecurity strategy.

Most organizations aren’t prepared for data loss. An Arcserve-sponsored independent global study found that 95 percent of responding IT decision-makers said their company had a disaster recovery plan. Unfortunately, only 24 percent had a mature, well-documented, tested, and updated plan. The worst time to find out you are unprepared is when a disaster strikes.

Develop a Business Continuity Plan

Your plan is a blueprint for responding to any disaster, from a fire to a catastrophic ransomware attack. For a detailed guide, read our recent post, “6 Steps for Developing a Business Continuity Plan.”

Protecting mission-critical data starts by ensuring your data is backed up following the 3-2-1-1 strategy. Continuous testing ensures your backups can be reliably recovered. Your plan will include how you will bring vital systems back online quickly. Because those systems constantly evolve, your business continuity plan must be a living document, continually reviewed, updated, improved, and widely disseminated throughout your company.

Classify Data to Meet Your RTOs and RPOs

Data classification is crucial for protecting critical data while containing storage and other costs. Our post, “A Four-Pronged Data Classification Strategy for Effective Data Protection, Retention, and Storage Optimization,”provides details.

This relates to your recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). You want to recover your most vital data first and within a specific timeframe. In many industries, like financial services, regulations dictate how long certain types of data need to be protected. 

High Availability, Automated Testing, and Air-Gapping

High-availability systems are built to act as a standby when a critical system goes down. Data protection and recovery software solutions like Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) offer high availability, reduce downtime from days to minutes, validate RTOs and RPOs, and provide granular reporting. The software features automated testing to ensure your business can get back up and running faster than you ever thought possible. 

Going back to the 3-2-1-1 strategy—which calls for keeping one copy of your data offsite—it’s well worth considering air-gapped tape backups. Arcserve Backup protects your high-capacity storage with the world’s most powerful tape backup software. Tape backups are recognized as one of the most affordable and cost-effective means of storing large volumes of data.

Get Help Getting Prepared

To be prepared for a ransomware attack or other data disaster, there's a lot to think about and do. Working through the details of disaster recovery and business continuity planning, choosing and deploying data protection solutions, and keeping those solutions operating effectively and efficiently often requires expert help.

That’s where Arcserve Technology Partners enters the picture. They can help guide you through the maze of options and implement a sound solution that ensures your business isn’t destroyed by an attack.

Find an Arcserve Technology Partner.

Check out our 30-day free trial offer for Arcserve UDP.