Let's be real -- at some point, your business data is going to be at risk. The question to ask yourself is if your business can continue to operate at its required level without access to file data?

Your answer will likely vary based on the type of file data, and how old it is. Obviously, the older the data, the less critical it is to have short Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). However, what is an ideal RTO for your active data versus your archive data.

If you don't have clear answers, or now how you'd recover in a disaster, it's time to look at an enterprise backup solution.

The Importance of an Enterprise Backup Solution

Simply put, data is vulnerable. Business data can be lost due to a wide variety of reasons including:

• Human error
• Machine error
• Viruses
• Natural disasters
• Hacking

You can never know at what moment your data may be at risk. In fact, 2016 was a record year for data breaches. Without a rock-solid backup plan, you may be facing a situation that can't be recovered.

It's time to make the move before it's too late.

Here are eight reasons why the best bet is a modern cloud-based enterprise backup solution.

1. Only Pay For What You Need

If you've looked into how expensive it is to procure and operate a traditional, enterprise-class system, you know it's not very feasible for small and medium-sized businesses.

In addition, classical backup vendors tend to view the cloud as an alternative to offsite tape storage. They expect you to backup locally to disk, and then make another copy to a secondary location. That's how it has been done for years now. But, with cloud, shouldn't we see some innovation?

Indeed, innovation in enterprise backup is possible with cloud. Firstly, a hosted enterprise backup solution combines cloud archiving concepts and is usage-based. You only pay for the volume and services your business requires.

As well, when software and hardware upgrades need to be made to keep your data protected, you don't need to lift a finger. You're already covered. One of the cool cloud backup features that has our clients excited is the ability to leverage seamless storage tiering in recovery, refresh, and migration scenarios!

If you're considering a move to the cloud as part of your enterprise backup solution, rest assured that you should look for solutions that give you the full advantages of the cloud and are not a legacy product that is simply running on virtual machines in the cloud.

2. An Enterprise Backup Solution is Fully Scalable

Do you know exactly where your business will be heading in the next year? What about the next 5 years?

It's hard to know how much growth you might experience.

An enterprise backup solution is easily scalable to meet your business needs no matter how much they change.

If you've been considering an investment in in-house upgrades, you'll see that an enterprise cloud solution can be much more affordable both now and in the future.

As you consider continuing with the status quo or beginning to adopt the cloud, consider hybrid cloud scenarios whereby your enterprise backup solution scales up as needed to be the secondary storage tier for your less active data. This is in addition to the cloud being a great offsite backup copy.

3. Today's Customers Don't Wait For Information

The goal of every business is to provide quality services and products to the customers they serve.

In a situation where your infrastructure has been compromised and an employee cannot access needed information immediately, they are likely to have productivity issues that are client facing.

The world we live in has become one of instant gratification. Your user bases expects to be able to instantly connect to data at any time that is convenient for them.

An enterprise backup solution can also serve to keep data at your employee's fingertips. This is true in a ransomware scenario, or any other type of data loss situation. In the cloud, your backup can also double as a self-service searchable archive with end user access that is secure and always available. Many customers enjoy knowing their cloud backup doubles as a business continuity platform.

4. Improve Overall Reliability and Recovery Speed

Without a fast and reliable way of recovering and restoring data, a backup solution is rather meaningless.

When employing an enterprise backup solution, particularly in the cloud, you want to consider how easy it is to recover. For instance, can you recover individual files which are the most common recovery type? In a recovery scenario, can you be smart about recovery or do you need to plug your network connection downloading entire backups?

When you work with the right service provider, you can establish objectives for recovery times and recovery points that fit the needs of your business. And, the right solution will streamline your existing on-premises backup investments while using the cloud to add new flexible recovery options to your data protection portfolio.

5. Help Keep Your Data Secure

If your data falls into the wrong hands, it (and you) could be in big trouble.

The right enterprise backup solution will support full encryption for all files transmitted to the cloud vault. They are encrypted before transmission and remain encrypted once they arrive.

As the customer, you are the only one who has access to a decryption key.

Seamless encryption of your data backups is just the start of your security strategy. Hackers, especially ransomware attacks, are wise to backup interfaces and have been known to attack backups as well. Therefore, your enterprise backup solution should have additional security measures to ensure authenticated, authorized, and monitored access around your data.

6. Free Up Your IT Team For More Pressing Projects

Your IT resources are valuable -- and expensive. When they spend unnecessary time working on data backup and recovery, they are losing time that could be spent on projects more profitable to the company.

An enterprise solution is the answer to solving this problem.

With built-in scalability that evolves with your business -- and a third party team handling all upgrades and recovery -- your IT team will gain hours of productive time each week.

This is a big deal for IT employees that are already pressed for time on a daily basis. It will also help you better target ways that the team can be used to improve the bottom line.

7. Protect Data Stored in Endpoint Devices

The workplace has become a mobile one. More employees are storing sensitive corporate data on smartphones, laptops, and tablets.

It's important that all of this data is backed up in a central repository in case one of these devices are stolen or lost. An enterprise solution allows you to do this automatically.

In addition, you won't need to fear that sensitive data could get into the wrong hands. Using remote data wipe on lost or stolen devices will remove all data on these devices so that it can't be accessed by anyone outside of the company-- although it will be safe on the cloud.

8. Full Data Protection that's Born in the Cloud

Traditional on-site data protection solutions do not go where more and more of your data is stored today -- in SaaS-based applications. These include:

• Office 365 Groups
• SharePoint
• Box
• Google Apps
• OneDrive for Business
• And many others

The trend of using SaaS-based applications isn't going away anytime soon. Companies are on tight budgets. These applications save money and the services are easy to deploy.

However, if you're using an on-site data protection solution, there is likely no way to backup cloud-born data. This can be dangerous for your company. IT leaders are becoming aware of the need to backup data in SaaS applications. The concern is often to have protection against malicious or accidental user deletions.

A cloud-based enterprise solution will archive, backup, and offer recovery features for data that is born in SaaS-based applications.

Conclusion

Data loss and breaches can be the worst nightmare for any business. Not being able to recover data in a timely manner will cost you time, money and resources.

There's no better time than now to move to an enterprise backup solution with a trusted and experienced partner that innovates for the cloud era. We'll make the move as smooth and as possible so you can go back to doing what you do best -- running your business.

Schedule a demo today.