Why is it so hard for small businesses to back up their data?

GS RichCopy 360

According to research carried out by the website host and domain registrar 123-reg 1 in 10 small businesses never back up their data. This means that 10% of small businesses have no safety net in place in the event of hardware failure, security breach or even something as simple as user error.

These statistics are very worrying and when you consider how important digital data is to most businesses it is surprising that so few businesses back this data up.

Why don’t small businesses back up their data?

Part of the problem here is undoubtedly to do with education – many small business owners simply do not realise the importance of data backup until something goes wrong. After a business suffers from a hardware failure or a system compromised by a virus they will no doubt make data backup their number 1 priority forever more but up until this point many small businesses simply do not consider the fact that they might need a backup to rely on one day.

Having said that, a large part of the problem also comes down to the cost and availability of backup solutions for small businesses. The truth is that whilst there are lots of backup and recovery providers that cater for large enterprises there are very few that cater for small businesses. Smaller companies tend to have much less bandwidth and much lower IT budgets whilst still having ever increasing amounts of data to back up and this is problematic for most backup solutions providers.

The data landscape is changing

The root cause of this is due to the speed at which the technology industry is evolving. With the advent of cloud computing and other such technologies companies are making more and more use of data and demanding more and more functionality to make use of that data. Whilst SAAS models have made all the latest technologies available to smaller businesses at an affordable price point backup and recovery is an area that has not towed the line in this respect and is often far too expensive still for small businesses to implement.

This means that for most small businesses the options are either to install an extortionately priced Internet connection that can handle huge amounts of data transfer or to settle for an archaic backup solution and store data locally on tapes and other unreliable and insufficient media.

Bringing backup and recovery into the 21st century

Thankfully there are a few software developers that are doing something about this problem and bringing backup and recovery into the 21st century. GuruSquad are one such company that are most on the side of small businesses and who understand how modern technologies must cater for customers across the entire spectrum and not just to the largest enterprises.

Guru Squad have developed a backup solution called GS Rich Copy 360 Enterprise which has all of the features associated with enterprise backup solutions – block level data transfer, WAN optimization, encryption and logging to name a few – whilst being affordable for small businesses.

With GS Rich copy small businesses can synchronise or back up extremely large datasets spanning multiple Terabytes and millions of individual files over a typical small business WAN connection (10MB – 200MB).

This software is helping to bring down the percentage of businesses who do not have a data backup in place by making its implementation easy and affordable. Now any business can back up their data regularly to an offsite location without having to destroy their IT budget. The only thing required now is some much needed education for small businesses in order to help them understand the importance of data backup so that rather than suffering from an unrecoverable loss of data they can be safe in the knowledge that all of their important information is safe from hackers, viruses and user error.