One aspect that is often overlooked that can bring a business to its knees, irrespective of its past and current successes, is the lack of a robust backup and recovery strategy.

Starting any new business in today's volatile economy is a formidable challenge. It is estimated that at least 50% of them fail within the first five years. The businesses that do survive beyond those crucial years have to carefully refine their business processes and operations, and in particular how they manage and protect their information assets.

One aspect that is often overlooked that can bring a business to its knees, irrespective of its past and current successes, is the lack of a robust backup and recovery strategy to cater for their exponential growth of business data.

While most companies today have some type of backup strategy in place, not all backup solutions are created equal. In fact, many fall short of meeting the most basic tried and tested methodologies to securely backup and recover enterprise-wide information.

Some organisations use one or a combination of in-house hardware, tape libraries, portable hard drives and memory sticks to back up their data. Only too often, such backups are done on a ‘as and when’ basis instead of according to a fixed timetable. This can lead to missed data, duplication of data and data loss from hard disk drive failures, error-prone tapebased processes, power surges, loss or theft. Others opt for public cloud offerings, which leave them vulnerable to data compromises from hackers. They also run the risk of only having intermittent access to their business-critical information at crucial points in sales cycles with no accountability from their service provider ‘somewhere’ in the cloud.

While there are many horror stories about what could happen if a business suffers data loss, companies that aren’t able to resume operations within a few days of losing businesscritical information are likely to suffer dips in revenue and reputational risk with their customers. It is estimated that 65% of businesses that suffer a significant loss of data do not survive beyond a further 12-month period.

As small businesses grow to become mid-sized companies, itis vital for them to have rigid and automated operational backup and recovery strategies in place that will allow them to safely and securely store their data. Compliance and governance also becomes a greater issue as companies drive business value, so gaining visibility over their technology infrastructures is also a legal obligation that these organisations have to satisfy. In addition, many large customers will require companies to certify their compliance to strict risk management which will include disciplined and provable strategies for data protection.

These requirements place an additional burden on companies. Most growing organisations need all their human resources at their disposal to keep up with the pace of the expansion and cannot add additional resources to focus on rigorously backing up critical data on a continuous basis. Additionally, the lack of visibility over which files are business-critical versus those that are more transitory is an increasing organisational risk.

As the technology landscape continues to evolve, specialist cloud computing providers have emerged that offer secure off-site cloud data protection solutions backed by service level agreements (SLAs). These next-generation cloud solutions provide organisations fast, assured and automated backup of their mission critical information with the ability to recover lost data via web interface in a timely manner.

Automated cloud-based backup and recovery solutions not only reduce cost and administrative headaches, but frees up staff to focus on growing the business.

In closing, when going the cloud-based route it is important to ensure that service providers demonstrate the strictest processes and technologies to safeguard a company’sdata. This not only includes physical security of its data centres and acts of nature, but also written policies for proactive monitoring, data encryption in transit, encryption during storage, controlled access and verification of data integrity. If these requirements are satisfied, growing businesses can ensure that their journey to complete backup and recovery peace of mind is a successful one. TSB