Your Most Valuable Data Is Probably NOT Being Backed Up!

When we talk to small businesses, most tell us that they are backing up their servers and maybe even their Macs. And that’s great! But what about your most important data? That’s right, all of the emails, contacts, calendar items for your organization. Not to mention your Microsoft Teams & Sharepoint data. . .or all the Google Docs & Sheets and everything else in your organization’s shared drives. It’s rare that we encounter small businesses implementing these critical protections. The common refrain is to the effect of “It’s in the cloud - so I’m covered.” But as the cliche goes - the cloud is just someone else’s computer.

And if you read Microsoft & Google’s terms of service, they go to great lengths to limit the extent they are responsible for your data. Think of it like renter’s insurance. Microsoft/Google is responsible for insuring the structure. YOU are responsible for insuring the contents.

You may think it can’t or won’t happen to you. But last year Google accidentally deleted the entire Google Cloud account for a large Australian pension fund. Fortunately, they had some backups outside of their Google account and, after working with Google, were able to get back up and running in about 2 weeks.

Consider another scenario. . .you have a disgruntled employee who decided to delete the contents of their email account on their way out, trying to hide the messages to customers they were attempting to take with them. Or an employee accidentally deleted data from Sharepoint and it’s not discovered until Microsoft retention window has passed (93 days).

Fortunately, there are flexible options for protecting your organization’s critical cloud data, be it Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.