5 Reasons to Back Up Your Employees’ PCs

IT Infrastructure in your small business is becoming more complex. Before you only had servers and generic desktops to deal with, but the world has changed. Now you have virtualization, cloud VMs in IaaS clouds, data in SaaS clouds, and even mobile devices to worry about.

However, one very important area of your company operations tends to be ignored when it comes to data protection and business continuity — Windows PCs and laptops. Here are five reasons why you should include personal computers of your employees into your data protection strategy.

Almost everything your employees do, they do it on their computers. Sales use laptops to furnish contracts, and communicate with customers. Marketing and communications use PCs for planning, design, promotions, etc. Your finance team, your HR, your legal teams wouldn’t exist without PCs. In essence, your users and your company cannot operate without PCs. Up to 80 percent of vital company data is kept on PCs — just think about laptop of your CEO or CFO. You have to back up all that data, so you can always recover if anything happens.

In 2016, nearly 50 percent of organizations were hit with ransomware, the type of malware that encrypts files and demands payment for decryption, with an average ransom of $679. The industry experts predict that the threat is only going to grow. You have to protect your entire organization, and the only assured recourse to recover PCs from ransomware infections is  a good backup.

Many IT professionals cite the lack of storage capacity when justifying the absence of PC backups. Indeed, a company with 100 users may have to provision anywhere from two to 20TB for full backups, plus more space for incremental and differential backups. There are network bandwidth concerns as well.

However, this issue is easily resolved with Storage Deduplication. Usually your users’ PCs will have a lot of common data — operating systems, applications, even the copies of the same files. This makes deduplication very effective and your storage capacity requirements can be reduces by 10 to 50 times. In addition, if your backup solution (like Acronis Backup Advanced) supports source deduplication, it will help with network bandwidth as well, as only unique data is transferred over the network.

Another common argument in discussions of PC backup is remote users. Indeed, up to 70 percent of your staff can be mobile, working at remote locations, airports, cafes, and at customer sites. The perfect solution for them would be to store backups in the Cloud, instead of backing up data to your office via a VPN. The data can be securely encrypted at-source — so it will be safe in-flight and at-rest. Moreover, with backups in cloud storage, you can guide your users to recover their data and even their systems without needing to bring the PCs to your office.

The most important benefit of having PC backups in place is the ease of recovery. If the file is lost (or encrypted by ransomware), you can restore it with a few clicks. If the system has crashed, you can restore the full image — inclusive of the operating system, applications, settings, and even desktop wallpaper. It will take very little effort on your side, and your users can return to work in no time. You will be more productive (no tedious reinstallations), your users will be more productive (and happy), and your company will be more successful.

You should include your employees’ PCs into your Business Continuity Plan, if you haven’t already done so. You company and your users heavily depend on their PCs, and new threats, like ransomware, make it even more critical to protect their important data.

New technologies, like storage deduplication and cloud backups can alleviate issues with capacities and roaming users. And most importantly, the easy and complete recovery will let you and your users sleep well at night.

Try Acronis Backup Advanced today and start protecting your users from new malware threats and data loss!