Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 31 | Page 84

FINAL WORD Building a robust backup strategy for new remote workers The new working from home model has posed a number of challenges to businesses far and wide. Jay Ralph, Cloud Management Lead, SoftwareONE, suggests some best practice approaches to help tackle them head on. Data is the critical asset for modern organisations, sitting right at the beating heart of business growth and productivity. As a result, keeping it secure and having a robust backup and recovery plan in the event of an IT failure or cyberattack should be a top priority for all business leaders. The consequences of failing to do so can be truly catastrophic. Data breaches are estimated to cost enterprises an average of US$3.92 million and 60% of companies that lose their data may end up shutting down within six months of the disaster taking place. Businesses are also facing rising regulatory scrutiny, meaning the risks of data loss now stretch well beyond lost intellectual property and revenue. Now, as great swathes of the population have shifted towards working from home as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic ‘lockdown’ and may continue to do so after the crisis is over, businesses have quickly had to address how to secure their new remote workers. This is not always easy, especially for those organisations with a lower level of digital maturity than firms who’ve already been supporting flexible and homeworking for years. Those responsible for IT at businesses large and small must also grapple with an increasingly complex, siloed IT landscape; the number of hybrid cloud enterprises grew from 51% in 2018, to 58% in 2019. 84 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com