According to reports from tech industry leaders such as Cisco and Microsoft, cyber-attacks against businesses of all sizes are on the rise and doing more damage than ever.

• More than half of all businesses that are victims of a cyber-attack or data breach are subsequently subject to public scrutiny and suffer losses in brand reputation, customer loyalty, and customer trust.
• 29 percent of businesses that are victims of attacks lose revenue, and nearly 40 percent of those businesses lose more than 20 percent of total revenues.
• Among companies that suffer attacks or breaches, nearly a quarter of them lose significant business opportunities following the data-loss event.
• More than 20 percent of businesses that experience data loss or suffer a cyber-attack lose customers as well. And, 40 percent of those companies lose more than 20% of their customers.

Beyond cyber-attacks such as virus, malware, ransomware, there are the possible for physical hardware failures of systems, computers, servers, NAS, SAN for various reasons such as short-circuits, power spikes, overheating or even simply aging.

There could even be environmental disasters resulting in data loss. A fire, flood, or another type of natural disaster can wipe out all the data in your location and make recovery virtually impossible. And, if you don’t have multiple backups available, the simple theft of a hard drive or storage device could easily result in significant data loss. If that’s not enough, you should never take for granted the very real possibility of hard drive failures and other another types of hardware mishaps.

It is imperative that a business should employ some level of backups to ensure important documents can be retrieved under any unfortunate circumstances.