Bear in mind that without cloud backup you’ll need a budget for encryption software, for maintaining your hard-drives and the offsite location, and for getting the backups to the offsite location. Also, as your data grows you’ll need to purchase larger hard-drives and after years of use you’ll need to replace them.

Backed up data is what you get when you replicate data files and store them in a safe place away from where they’re usually kept. These backed up files can then be used to restore your data in the event of something happening to it. If you backup once daily, then you’ll never lose more than a day’s work. So it’s vital to backup. And it makes sense to take on the services of an online/cloud backup service, so that the process is regular, automated and assured.

The lifeblood of a business is its data because it includes all the information that it uses to operate, such as legal documents, contracts, accounting information, employee records, client information and general business data. If you lose this data you wouldn’t know how to contact your customers and suppliers, how to pay salaries, who has ordered goods and who needs to be paid or invoiced.

How safe do you want your data to be? How accountable do you want your service providers to be to you? In which global location is your backed up data being kept? Does it bother you? The answers to these questions are very important.