Defending Data:
Information loss costs businesses billions. Here’s how they can protect themselves.

The total amount of data moving around the planet is expected to double in the next three years. Much of that is from business operations, and relates to customers, employees, finances, inventories, supply chains and more.“Companies are using data in entirely new ways, especially small and medium businesses,” says Will Davis, a director at data protection specialist Synology. “They are more reliant on their data. They're making data-driven decisions for the direction of the business.”

This reliance on data means that losing it extracts a big financial toll. The average cost to recover from a breach is $4.4 million. And cyberattacks cost American businesses and consumers $7 billion in total in 2021. But protecting data is challenging. Human error, increasingly frequent natural disasters that can physically destroy systems and the growing sophistication of cyber-criminals are among the biggest threats.

The good news? There are some simple steps businesses can take to safeguard their data, without having to break the bank or hire legions of IT personnel.

The best defense is having reliable backups that can immediately restore data, whether that data is stored locally or in the cloud. The latter is becoming increasingly important as data stored on endpoints and local hard drives is no longer the only information at risk. Data on cloud email systems, chat systems, file shares, and cloud-based office productively apps can be lost as well. “Many mistakenly assume that just because data is in a cloud email app, it's backed up and prepared for a disaster,” says Patrick Deschere, marketing director at Synology.

It's not. Data in the cloud faces the same risks as data stored on-premises. Cloud-based risks include accidental deletion, infrastructure and hardware breakdowns and deletion or alteration from malware or by malicious insiders. Once that data is lost, it may not be recoverable. Even if it is, it may take days or weeks to restore, depending on the recovery policy of the service provider or the sheer volume.

The stakes are rising. Thanks to changes in technology and the rise of hybrid workers, more staff today are working in cloud systems accessed through a browser or application. Workers are now spending 75 percent of their time online. Hybrid work also means more data is scattered across cloud systems and devices connected to the internet. Organizations need effective and reliable ways to back up all this data no matter where it resides.

Still, many companies lack a robust backup or data availability strategy and still back up solely on-premises.

To be sure, the first step is to maintain some hardware redundancy in house. Local backups have big advantages. They can help companies recover data quickly while meeting specific governance and compliance mandates. Local backups can also be more cost-effective than some cloud services. But while a local backup can help with recovery from some incidents, it won't help should the office flood or catch fire.

For full protection, organizations should create layers of defenses. Adding local and cloud-based backups to a primary cloud provides extra protection. “There's a historical mantra that if you don't have three copies of your data, you don't have any copies, and it remains so,” says Mark Snyder, systems administrator at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “We've had many experiences when a cloud storage provider has gone down, and the local backup was the backup that saved the day,” says Snyder.

“This is why the most effective strategy is to have tiers of backup, with the primary backup being on-premises and secondary backups offsite or on another cloud service,” he explains. Snyder turned to Synology for such an architecture. “Synology offers several tools that we use to automatically backup our data so that we can depend on it being there and be able to fully recover when needed,” he says.

Scott Martin, IT director at Roseburg, Ore.-based collections and billing company CSO Financial, Inc., understands the value of protecting data – and learning from others. He got a valuable lesson when a family member’s employer fell victim to ransomware. “They paid half the ransom and got nothing back,” Martin recalls. “They had to rebuild the entire accounting system.”

Martin says he chose Synology to safeguard his organization’s data because it was the most cost-effective provider and it delivered all the capabilities needed to ensure effective backup and recovery. “The other solutions were two to three times the cost of the Synology hardware, and they didn't provide the same level of back up and data-availability software,” says Martin. “Synology provides both the hardware and software needed for backup in an effective and affordable way,” he says. “There are no other vendors necessary.”

Tools like Synology’s Active Backup for Business provide a unified dashboard, straightforward deployment and comprehensive reporting. “The software allows us to protect our data through encryption and control who has access to our backups. This enables us to perform our daily back ups, back up those backups and take copies offsite that sit in a safe. If we were to get hit for a ransom, we could restore everything backed up,” Martin says.

Both Martin and Snyder stress the importance of finding a backup and recovery partner that delivers not only the storage hardware but also the backup software that enables the backup strategy to be executed automatically, with the capability to scale to thousands of cloud services, servers, workstations and virtual machines. “Backup and recovery must be an automatic part of the organization's workflow, so the copies are always updated on-site and in the cloud,” says Snyder.

Synology provides tools that pull together data that’s sprawled across different systems and clouds in a way that makes backups easy to manage with limited budget and staffing, according to Martin and Snyder.

This level of protection is no longer exclusive to large enterprises. “Because it was once so expensive, this architecture was inaccessible to small and medium-sized businesses. Now they can afford full end-to-end protection for any type of business, and expense is no longer an excuse because with Synology there are no software license fees or hidden costs,” says Synology's Davis.

“Backup and recovery is an investment we all have to make,” concludes UNC’s Snyder. “It is never a fun conversation when a grad student or primary researcher comes in and explains that they lost two years of grant data. It’s a hard life lesson.” With the proper backup and recovery strategy and tools, it's no longer a lesson any organization needs to learn for itself.