Managed IT services vendor Securicom warns there are risks associated with storing company data in the cloud and that it’s safer for South African businesses to backup with vendors operating locally.

Many people aren’t sure about what cloud computing actually is, yet it already plays a large role in our personal and working lives. If you have a gmail address, your email is hosted in the cloud; if you bank online and participate in social media you’re computing in the cloud.

In the last few years, it has become common practice for companies to install some kind of backup procedure. However, implementations often fail to take a holistic view of the organisation’s data continuity requirements: important files are not included, all data sources aren’t factored in, application data is overlooked, formats are neglected, etc.

When selecting data to back up, it is relatively easy to select all of one’s Excel spreadsheets and Word documents. These are typically stored in a folder on your machine. To select these for backup, you simply select the folder that they are stored in for ongoing backup. Any new and existing documents and spreadsheets are then backed up on an ongoing basis.

The vast majority of small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) in South Africa use some iteration of the Sage Pastel software platform. As with any software out there, things do go wrong at times: data gets corrupted or deleted, hard drives crash or tape drives fail at the most inopportune time. The sad reality is that many businesses do not have backups, let alone business continuity in mind at all.

Cloud backup: What should I back up? This is a common question for organisations as the influx of data that spans an average network has simply exploded.

In South Africa and most of the rest of Africa, Sage Pastel Partner Advantage is the accounting system of choice for medium and large businesses looking for desktop accounting software. Its entry-level option, Sage Pastel Xpress, is used by many thousands of small businesses to run their accounting.

Have a quick look at this quiz to see whether your business data is safe:

When considering systems management software, there are two main factors that need to be considered: user-friendliness and intuitiveness.