Smart Organizations Will Want to Reassess Their Laptop Backup and Mobile Backup Strategies
This year has provided many of us with an unprecedented array of choices in how and where we work: the kitchen table, the extra bedroom, or even a chair beside the backyard barbeque.
COVID-19 has brought the work world into the comfort – or discomfort – of our homes. Gallup said 62% of employed Americans report having worked from home at some point during the coronavirus pandemic.
The pandemic has required both employees and employers to make big adjustments in our work approaches and environments. Many suspect this trend will not disappear as society reestablishes itself. In fact, indications suggest that remote work is here to stay. This new way of life for businesses and their workers has important data protection implications for how organizations protect, backup, and recover their critical business data.
Remote Work: The New (More Productive?) Normal
Many of the world’s largest tech companies are leading the way on the path to a permanent remote work world. Where these tech giants go, other organizations of all types and sizes will follow.
Google plans to let employees work from home through at least July of 2021. For the foreseeable future, Google workers are allowed in the office only “to complete the job duties they can’t complete from home,” the company said.
Mark Zuckerberg recently said that up to half of Facebook employees could work remotely within five to 10 years. Both Square and Twitter have also announced that their employees will be allowed to continue working from home permanently following this global health crisis.
Many startups seem to be following suit. The Kung Group, an executive coaching and consulting firm, recently surveyed more than 500 founders of venture-based companies. Seventy percent of the group said that they would allow some or all of their employees to continue working remotely even after their offices reopen.
The vast majority (76%) of those founders have seen that worker productivity has either remained the same or improved in light of the remote work movement. Embracing the expanded work-from-home trend long term can benefit businesses by allowing them to redirect spending on office space and related costs to more strategic pursuits. Sixty-five percent of founders said that if stay-at-home orders were lifted tomorrow, they would still not allow their employees to return to the office. Lastly, 66% of the Kung survey group said they are reconsidering their investments in their physical offices altogether. A new, more productive, less real estate-intensive remote work world has arrived.
Ransomware Was Already a Huge Problem – Now It Is Accelerating
With more frequent work-from-home activity, ransomware attacks have increased beyond their already-significant growth. Ransomware is a type of cyber attack for which bad actors encrypt an organization’s data to bring its IT infrastructure and associated operations to a standstill until the impacted entity pays the attackers a ransom to decrypt that data.
Ransomware is a massive threat of extreme frequency and impact. Astoundingly, a business falls victim to a ransomware attack every 14 seconds – and that time is shortening! This is alarming since ransomware tends to be very costly; the average ransomware payment amount is $84,116. Every minute that a company can’t access its data to conduct business, it loses revenues and reputation.
Sadly, bad actors have identified this time of crisis as a great opportunity for ransomware. A July Threatpost story said the pandemic has led to a sharp spike in ransomware in the U.S. – more than doubling year-over-year.
People may feel safer at home, and they may well be. But that doesn’t mean the data and devices they are working with are safer. In fact, they’re not, and smart businesses need to address the looming threats.
Your Endpoint Data Will Be Lost or Corrupted – You Need to Be Ready
One key challenge that businesses face today is how to quickly (and reliably) back up critical data – wherever employees work, and on whatever endpoint devices (laptops, mobile phones, tablets) they are using.
It is not a question of if your endpoint data will be lost or corrupted. It is just a matter of when it will occur.
The increase in the remote workforce and cybersecurity threats, such as ransomware and malware, require that businesses reevaluate their current backup and recovery practices. Revising your backup and recovery strategy is more important than ever. As with every great strategy, it’s not just about the tools you deploy, it’s also about the plan for recovery.
Secure and Easy-to-Use Backup for Remote Work Operations
The Infrascale Cloud Backup (ICB) solution provides businesses with the data protection and endpoint backup and recovery solution they need in this changing and distributed work environment.
ICB protects your most critical data, including files and folders, SQL databases, Exchange data files, and QuickBooks and other accounting files. It fulfills endpoint backup and retention requirements for: Android and iOS phones/tablets, Windows and Mac OS desktops/laptops, Windows Servers, and other storage devices. Equally as important, it makes recovery and the restoration of the critical data and business processes fast and easy – both for end users and for administrators.
ICB addresses the important challenge of security. It protects organizations and all of their remotely located employees and assets against ransomware attacks by providing anomaly detection, proactive alerting, and unlimited file version history for easy rollback. Each of these features helps to facilitate prompt detection and expedited (and painless) recovery from a ransomware attack. If and when ransomware hits, a company can avoid the ransomware payment and be back up-and-running in a few hours – minimizing the business impact.
The Infrascale Cloud Backup security solutions help organizations with device loss prevention and remediation via features such as endpoint geo-tracking and remote wipe. Data in use and data in transit is secured through technologies such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) and AES 256-bit encryption.
Managing Remote Work Operations Can Be Hard – But ICB Makes It Easy
Organizations that adopt the ICB endpoint backup solution will benefit from a number of administrator-friendly capabilities. Infrascale provides a single pane-of-glass management interface to remotely manage, remotely restore data, build polices and deployment rules, as well as manage reporting and alerting to monitor backup operations. If the UI is not preferred, there are robust API/SDKs available.
ICB is ideal for today’s remote work environment because it allows for automated (silent) installation to branch offices and site-specific policies – for the office or for the home. Administrators can automate deployment of remote backup agents – the same agents that have minimal impact to the host system (and that can be hidden from the end user).
Alerting and monitoring is highly customizable and allows for granular monitoring and automated reporting. After all, the administrators must know of issues that occur in the work-from-home environment – and whether data is at risk.
When Infrascale Cloud Backup is deployed by a managed service provider (MSP) there are additional integrations with professional services automation (PSA) and remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools – for billing, reporting, and other management capabilities — minimizing the need for administrators to have to access multiple dashboards.
Infrascale Enables You to Protect Data Wherever It Roams
Remote work is the new normal and ransomware is on the rise in these unprecedented times.
Inaction is dangerous and can jeopardize your business. Sixty percent of small and medium businesses close within 6 months of being victims of ransomware.
Smart businesses will establish plans to contend with the growing remote workforce and the increase in cyberthreats that creates. Those plans will include implementing endpoint backup solutions. Infrascale Cloud Backup makes endpoint backup easy for remote workers, while meeting enterprise requirements for security and remote management. This is a tool that rises to today’s challenge.
ICB ensures that wherever your data is – and whatever device it lives on – you’ll be ready.
