Data backup and recovery is an essential aspect of any business regardless of its size. The ability to recover quickly and easily from a data loss incident is key to minimizing downtime and keeping the business moving forward. However, studies show that 60% of backups are incomplete and 50% of data restores fail. Adding to the challenge is the responsibility of restoring data, which for most businesses, lies solely with the IT department. This increases the IT burden as well as the duration of downtime and impacts productivity. Depending on the downtime period and lost productivity, your organization can also suffer significant financial losses.
Therefore, it’s vital to educate your employees to self-restore data to reduce financial risk, save time and maximize productivity. Read on to learn about the key steps to enable your organization and individual end users to self-restore after a data loss incident.
How data loss happens in SaaS platforms
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is quickly becoming the default productivity tool to run and scale businesses. It is cost-efficient, faster, easy to use and enables better team collaboration. The COVID-19 crisis has further amplified cloud adoption and reliance on SaaS solutions. According to Statista, the worldwide SaaS market size is expected to reach $138 billion in 2022. It is expected that the total global data storage will be more than 200 zettabytes by 2025, and around half of that data (100 zettabytes) will be stored in the cloud.
While SaaS applications offer multiple benefits to individuals and businesses alike, SaaS data loss is not uncommon. In fact, more than 70% of SaaS users have lost their data in the cloud more than once. It’s no surprise that inadequate backup capabilities were the biggest data protection challenge for businesses in 2021, with more than 40% of companies struggling to fully back up all their data.
The most common causes of SaaS data loss include phishing, ransomware and malware attacks, human error, malicious behavior, and configuration and sync errors. According to CISCO’s 2021 Cybersecurity threat trends report, phishing accounts for about 90% of data breaches. More than 35% of organizations worldwide revealed they were victims of some form of ransomware attacks in 2021. Human error is responsible for more than 50% of data breaches. The 2020 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report revealed the number of breaches due to misconfigurations doubled from 20% in 2019 to 40% in 2020.
Why employee education and self-restoration is important
Data loss statistics show that the average cost of downtime for businesses of all sizes is about $4,500/minute. Self-restoration with proper training is a healthy strategy to mitigate risks associated with data loss incidents as well as reduce the burden on IT teams who are often bogged down dealing with data loss issues. An average medium-sized company deploys at least one full-time IT resource only for data restoration. By empowering your end users to restore their own lost or misplaced data, your company can not only save IT time but also reduce help desk costs.
Self-service data restore can also play a significant role in reducing the costs associated with data recovery, which has drastically increased (200%) over the years. Security awareness training can help reduce your organization’s chance of experiencing a cybersecurity disaster by up to 70%. With more empowered users, restores can be accomplished quickly without any IT intervention to ensure minimum or no downtime and maximum productivity.
Key steps to enable end users to self-restore lost data
- Make it a strategy pillar: Strengthen your organization’s muscle to combat cyberthreats by engaging all teams. More than 90% of cyberattacks enter via email. Make training and awareness a part of our company culture. By educating employees, providing appropriate training and creating awareness on the latest cyberthreats, your organization can greatly reduce the chances of falling victim to data loss incidents.
- Educate using data: Seeing is believing. Share data points with your teams so they are convinced and are able to understand the real risk. (See above)
- Train users to self-restore: Tools like Spanning possess the capabilities for end users to self-restore their data with zero IT intervention. IT teams should leverage this to enable their users to be more independent with data recovery.
- Create a feedback loop: By using data backup and recovery solutions like Spanning, your IT team will save time with tasks related to data recovery. However, they must proactively ensure end users are actually able to self-restore and are following correct processes. A thorough and well-thought-out communication plan will help ensure reminders are in place and training doesn’t stop in the classroom.
- Keep managers involved: Team managers across functions must be an extension of IT when it comes to cybersecurity. They must help coach and create a culture of regular training and awareness to ensure success.
Empower your end users to self-restore after a data loss incident with Spanning Backup
Spanning Backup for Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and Salesforce is unique in its ability to enable both administrators as well as end users to quickly find and restore data to its original state in just a few clicks. Spanning eliminates the painful task of searching for lost data and enables quick, self-service restore in seconds through an intuitive user interface. With Spanning Backup by your side, your users will be able to restore lost or corrupted files quickly and easily to ensure maximum productivity and meet even the most ambitious recovery time objectives (RTOs).
