Will your company be able to recover business data in the event of a natural disaster, cyberattack or equipment failure? Or would you experience a complete data loss?
As we become more dependent on technology for our day to day operations, it is imperative that we take extra steps to not only prevent data loss, but to also recover data in the event of a disaster. For most small businesses, it is difficult to maintain an internal IT team with the capabilities to manage the day-to-day IT tasks, but also install security. Utilizing a managed services company that has a team for dealing with your everyday IT tasks and who are also data recovery experts is a great, cost-effective alternative. At Kansas City Managed IT our team of data recovery engineers will assist your company with setting up layers of protection to prevent data loss. When your company engages with managed services, any issues pertaining to data recovery services will be met with expedited service.
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Professional data recovery services are often separate companies from your managed service provider. Professional recovery services can be performed for non-managed service clients, which is often more time intensive. If the right equipment, backups etc. are not in place the client could still experience a data loss. Not all managed service agreements include professional data recovery services, mostly because it keeps the monthly cost down to exclude those particular services. Insurance providers offer cyber security insurance, which is intended to cover your data recovery process. Most businesses combine cyber security insurance with their managed service plan.
Kansas City Managed IT understands the importance for a professional data recovery to be timely and safe. Businesses should mitigate risk with critical data by relying on security, backups and efficient infrastructure setups provided by our team. To get started, we perform free evaluations of your company’s technical environment to assess any vulnerabilities.
WAYS DATA LOSS CAN OCCUR
Natural Disasters: Natural disasters are unpreventable and unexpected, so it is imperative that your company establishes a data management strategy that allows for a quick recovery when affected. For example, if a tornado, flooding or fire were to destroy your office and equipment, a disaster recovery plan will get you back up and running as soon as possible. Thankfully, equipment can be replaced, but business data located on-premise could be destroyed and unrecoverable. Backing up the data and equipment is essential. At Kansas City Managed It, we recommend a cloud backup so your data will be kept off-premise, unaffected by any of these events.
Equipment Failure End of Life: Equipment ages and eventually can fail unexpectedly. When equipment fails, you no longer have access to the device. However, recovery specialists can often obtain recovered data from a piece of equipment that has reached end of life. In the event they are not able to recover the data, backups are essential for accessing data. In this instance a local or cloud backup would be utilized to load data on new equipment.
Internal Part Failure: There are numerous internal parts to any type of IT equipment, but here are some of the most common part failures:
Hard Drive Failure: A hard drive (Hard Disk Drive or HDD) holds your data, so in the case of a hard drive failure your data could be lost. An attempt to recover lost data when the hard drive (HDD) comes from a laptop or desktop involves removing the hard drive and running recovery software. The recovery software extracts data for a hard drive recovery (if there is not a current backup). Keep in mind that hard drive data recovery is not always successful.
Solid State Drive Failure: A solid state drive (SSD) could be used in place of a hard drive, and tend to have a lower failure rate than a hard drive. When they do fail, the SSD will be removed like the hard drive, and recovery software run to try and extract the critical data.
Operating System Failure: An operating system failure means Windows or the Mac OS was unable to boot. In most cases our data recovery experts will be able to perform a successful recovery. If a backup had been done before the failure, the data recovery engineer will secure the data from the backup.
Power Supply Failure: A power supply failure can cause a sudden crash of the machine. If the machine contains a backup, when a replacement power supply or a new machine arrives, the data recovery process should be simple with a small amount of lost data, if any.
Memory Failure: A memory failure occurs when the machine locks up and requires a manual power down. There is risk of losing work or progress currently open on the system that was not saved, such as a word document. In this instance there is a high success rate in recovering most data.
Raid Failure: Raid, or a raid array, are found within servers and provide redundancy by duplicating the data on the server. Raid/raid arrays are a great way to prevent data loss in the case of a Hard Disk Drive or SSD failure. If the raid array fails, but the hard drive or solid-state drive are still working then the raid can be replaced, and the data replicated on the new raid. If both the hard drives, solid state drives and raid experience failures simultaneously and there is no backup, a raid data recovery would need to be performed by a recovery specialist. The success rate is not high. In the case of ransomware, the raid/raid arrays will still be encrypted, meaning a backup will also be necessary to protect data and file systems.
Power Surge: To prevent the effects of a power surge, you should have all equipment plugged into surge protectors and power supplies. If not plugged into a surge protector, the machine is susceptible to power surges that can damage your equipment.
Cyberattack: Cyberattacks can affect your equipment or network in different ways, but the most common are ransomware attacks, which result in your machines being encrypted, making the data unreadable without a decryption code.
DATA STORAGE/BACKUP OPTIONS
Cloud Backup: A cloud backup will, back up to the cloud. The benefit of a cloud backup is that there is a data backup offsite, so in the event of something happening to the machine or location the machine was in, the data will still be safe.
Local Backup: A local backup is a storage device that you are backing up to that is kept onsite. It should be noted that if anything were to happen to the location and the storage device and backup were both destroyed, there would likely be no way to recover the data.
Cloud Hybrid: A cloud hybrid backup solution would be the best option for safely backing up and storing your data. A cloud hybrid has a local backup meaning a backup device in the office replicates to the cloud. The backups typically include your server, file systems, and anything saved to the hard drive. Similarly to cloud backup providers, Kansas City Managed IT partners with cloud hybrid companies that take full measures to secure data in the cloud, even if something happens to the local backup device.
Individual Computer/Mac Backups: Backing up of individual machines can be done to a local storage device or to the cloud. If an incident results in lost data, one of our data recovery engineers can work to restore that data from the backup. A cloud backup should protect against operating system failure, issues with the hard drive and firmware.
External Hard Drives/USB Flash Drives: Next to not having any backup or outside storage, this is the least recommended option. Yes, data can be backed up to external hard drives and flash drives. Normally, these backups are not automated to run every day, meaning if something happened to the machine all the data since the last backup would likely be unrecoverable. In the case of most cyberattacks, anything connected to the machine, including external hard drives and USB flash drives, will also be affected by encryption. Unfortunately, many of the attacks are implemented by the hacker hiding the malware deep in a folder where it is not easily found. This could result in the malware finding its way to your flash drive or hard drive, corrupting your backup..
If you must use external drives or flash drives, make sure to have multiple that are alternated out daily and brought offsite. This could still result in data loss in some cyberattack situations, which would be a major risk.
Mobile Device Backups: Most mobile device backups are cloud based. It is important to set the storage to backup different media types, so pictures or music are not excluded. Depending on the type of cell phone (Android cell phone, Apple iPhone) or other mobile device (Apple iPad, Android Tablet), the recommendation for backup solutions will vary. Typically, with a cell phone or tablet, a successful recovery of data is likely as long as backups are set to happen at least daily. Some sort of backup usually comes as a standard service with a provider until a certain limit on your storage media is reached. iPhones will backups to iCloud, while Android has various options depending on the phone and the service provider.
If you aren’t sure if your small business is setup to prevent data loss, please reach out to our team of recovery specialists for a free evaluation. We work with both Windows and Mac based environments and would be happy to review different ways to help secure data.