Cloud storage is great, but it’s not foolproof. For personal data—what you mostly consider of minor importance—cloud storage is probably fine. But business data—including critical emails and documents—anything you think of as essential to your business, you’ll want to seriously think about the need for cloud-to-cloud backup.

Evaluate your current storage and backup

First, you need to understand what you have stored in the cloud, and what backup, if any, you already have in place. Many major providers, such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, have backup solutions, but these are often not included with the standard subscription but are an additional fee. It’s also important to understand whether these are backups or archives. The purpose of backups is for recovery—to protect current and revision data. Archives are for preserving historical data, and to enable compliance with legal and business data retention policies, as well as supporting eDiscovery.

Cloud data protection issues

There are, of course, limits to these provider backups; that’s why it’s not advisable to use a single solution for your business backups. Accidental deletion of emails and documents by users is the most common source of data loss. But there are other ways that data can be compromised, including errors that can result in data being lost or overwritten, as well as a hacked email that can result in files being deleted or corrupted. That’s why more customers, especially those using Office 365, should consider third-party solution backups. These solutions provide an additional layer of protection, much longer retention periods, and more comprehensive recovery options—and they are specifically designed to integrate with their system cloud provider.

Your data can be threatened, even in the cloud

We recently had a client that clicked on an email attachment that looked legit, and once the user entered their email and password, the hacker had all the information needed to redirect all incoming mail to the deleted folder; had we not had a cloud-to-cloud backup in place, that user would have permanently lost days of email and documents. In this case, the third-party solution sent all incoming emails to the cloud-to-cloud backup, so regardless of whether the email ever reached the inbox, we had a copy.  Hackers continue to get more sophisticated, looking to exploit people’s trust, and creating havoc—so that without a backup of your backup, data is corrupted, damaged, or just gone, with no way of recovery.

Stop data loss before it happens

With more people working remotely, there are more people using Teams, Exchange, Sharepoint, and OneDrive. While this is a great solution to allow businesses to run better and allows each user to access all products with a single username and password, that means there’s also increased vulnerability—both for the company and its clients. Businesses that keep a cloud-to-cloud backup can sleep easier knowing they are protected in the event of accidental deletion or malicious acts.

To learn more about the benefits of third-party cloud-to-cloud backup solutions, watch our video.

If you’re interested in third-party cloud-to-cloud backup solutions, get in touch with Geovani Aday, COO of Symbits, which provides innovative, flexible IT solutions for businesses, retailers, and manufacturers. You can reach Geo at [email protected].