You are constantly juggling multiple roles and responsibilities in your business. Whether it’s managing operations, setting goals, or ensuring the safety of your business investments, there’s always something to do. However, in the ever-growing digital landscape, data safety has become more critical than ever before. SharePoint is one such platform that helps you collaborate and share data in the cloud, making it essential to back up your SharePoint regularly.
Introduction
As a business leader, you’re probably relying heavily on your SharePoint for document management, project management and communication tools. It’s great to have all your business systems centralized in one place and easily accessible from anywhere, but have you ever thought about what would happen if all that data was suddenly gone? Just because your SharePoint is on the cloud doesn’t mean it’s immune to risks like data loss. In this blog post, I’ll discuss the benefits of backing up your SharePoint and the risks of not doing it.
Accidental Deletion
We have all had that situation where we have accidentally clicked something, and the file just goes missing. It’s not uncommon for employees to accidentally delete important files or folders in SharePoint. Without proper backup, retrieving that lost information can be a daunting and almost impossible task. Regular backups guarantee that you won’t lose valuable files and data due to unfortunate accidents.
Data Corruption
Another significant risk of not backing up your SharePoint is the possibility of data loss or corruption. This is another annoying problem that I have personally had happen at the worst possible times, where I click on a file and it just won’t open. The causes could be unexpected software failures or other technical issues, which could cause irreparable damage to your SharePoint data or even the entire site. Regular, scheduled backups ensure that even in the event of any corruption, you’re not left scrambling to find a backup that won’t cause chaos in your workday.
Cyber Attacks
SharePoint may be on the cloud, but that doesn’t mean it’s immune to cyber-attacks. Hackers can gain access to your SharePoint site and steal, alter, or even delete critical data – which could bring your operations to a standstill. In other posts we discuss the importance of ensuring that you use strong passwords and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to help prevent breaches, but the reality is that even with these extra levels of security, they can still happen unfortunately. With regular backups, you can restore your SharePoint site to a previous version before the cyber-attack to help mitigate damages.
Compliance and Legal Issues
Regular SharePoint backups ensure your business stays in compliance with data retention and privacy regulations. If you’re in a regulated industry like healthcare or finance, failing to back up your SharePoint data could lead to costly legal battles and data breaches.
Business Continuity
Backing up your SharePoint is one of the most basic and smart business continuity strategies. A site outage or data breach could bring your business to a screeching halt, and without a backup, you could find yourself losing valuable customers, profits, and market share. Often in a disaster situation, without proper back ups, it can cripple a business and leave you with a significant amount of downtime. A robust backup protocol ensures the continuity of your business operations, even in the face of unexpected threats.
Conclusion
As you can see, backing up your SharePoint is crucial for small business owners to prevent data loss, ensure compliance, and promote business continuity. Regular backups guarantee you can quickly restore your SharePoint to a functioning state after an accident, technical glitch or malicious attack. Not backing up your data could lead to devastating consequences, including business operations collapsing. Therefore, it’s time to rethink your backup protocols and settle on a comprehensive system that will ensure your SharePoint data is always safe and secure, regardless of unforeseen scenarios.
