How Corrupted Files Can Effect Your Business

Imagine this scenario. Someone just broke into your office or small business and stole most of your equipment. Your cabinets are rummaged through and all the computers are gone. Along with your organization’s hard drives, your team’s work including spreadsheets and files are gone.

Luckily you have insurance and a cloud backup solution for this very situation. You finally get to boot things back up and you try to restore your files and…. “Corrupt file.”

Your backup failed.

It is well established that small and enterprise businesses need to backup their files. The ages of keeping everything on your desktop or laptop computer and hoping for the best are over. Cybersecurity is one of the fastest growing industries for a reason. Having a reliable backup ensures continuity for your business through the most difficult curveballs.

Not having a reliable backup could cost your business thousands, if not millions of dollars. According to an IBM Study, the average cost of a data breach is $3.86 million dollars. Another factor is the increasing threat of ransomware strikes. Unfortunately, small businesses are oftentimes the target of these attacks due to their lack of cybersecurity.

Another major variable that is overlooked is natural disasters and sometimes simple thunderstorms. FEMA estimates that 40% of businesses fail to open after suffering from a natural disaster and loss of data is a major contributor.

Normally files become corrupted when being written to a disk or backup solution. This usually occurs during the saving process of a file. Many times the application that you are using while saving the work can glitch, causing an issue to occur. The internet browser you are using to download a file from the internet can cause corruption as well.

When you shutdown a computer, you are normally given a warning with a pop-up to save any files or close them out properly. When the power goes out abruptly, for example a power surge, your computer doesn’t have the proper time to save files. Therefore it crashes. You can even backup a corrupt file to your cloud storage. Sometimes errors can even take place during the transferring of a valid file to another device.

Unfortunately, when these files become corrupted there is no saving them. Effectively, they are useless. To ensure the scenario above, storm shutdown, ransomware attack, or any other type of situation doesn’t take down your entire operation through the network; backup verification is a necessity. Your internal team can handle this process manually, but this can be very time consuming.

On the other hand, you can hire Ameritech Data Solutions to do the job for you and ensure that all your files are properly backed up and verified. We will check to make sure all the file sizes being transferred fit into a specified range. We can even identify expected size ranges as files are changing all the time. We’ll check each file’s integrity after transmission as well as verification of certain keywords in your configuration.

If you’re interested in learning more about our backup solutions or how we can help your business, reach out to a professional at Ameritech Data Solutions today.