Five Telltale Signs You Don’t Have the Latest Backup System

It’s Backup Awareness Month—time to take stock of how well your backup system is serving your organization. To help you get started, here are five telltale signs you don’t have the most modern endpoint backup system:

1. You still get Help Desk calls to retrieve lost data.
The latest backup systems feature intuitive, self-service backup so employees can restore their own data. Not surprisingly, enterprises with a modern endpoint backup system cited fewer backup/restore-related support tickets as a top benefit in a recent survey. More importantly, they were able to use the reduced support time to cost justify their more-advanced system.

2. Your backup system doesn’t support multiple platforms.
Today, 96 percent of companies support Macs. That’s because the enterprise has gone heterogeneous and your backup system should, too. A modern endpoint backup system doesn’t care whether a file is on Windows, Linux or OS X, or whether a device operates on iOS, Android or Kindle Fire. It backs up every file, every time, from anywhere—without requiring a cumbersome VPN connection.

3. You have no visibility into what’s on employee devices.
The latest backup systems give IT a comprehensive, single point of visibility and control across every employee device in the enterprise—including desktops, tablets and smartphones. You gain the insight to pinpoint leaks and prevent insider threat, because you know:

• Which employees are uploading which files to third-party clouds
• Which employees have transferred which files to removable media
• Which employees have uploaded which files via web browsers, including web-based email attachments
• Unusual file restores that may signal compromised credentials
• The content of files and folders
• The location of sensitive, classified and “protected” data

4. You can’t pinpoint where a breach occurred.
With legacy backup, you have to conduct lots of inquiries that take lots of time. With a modern endpoint system, you have visibility into every endpoint (see #3 above), so you can quickly identify where a breach occurred and reduce your Mean Time to Contain (MTTC). You also eliminate unnecessary reporting, because with 100 percent data attribution, you know for certain whether or not there was a breach.

5. You have to confiscate a device to enact a legal hold.
Really? Are you still putting up with that significant productivity drain? With a modern endpoint backup system, your legal team can conduct in-place legal holds and file collection without confiscating user devices—and without having to rely on IT staff.

If two or more of these statements apply to your organization, it’s time to go shopping for modern endpoint backup. See #1 above on how to cost justify it.

Download The Guide to Modern Endpoint Backup and Data Visibility to learn more about selecting a modern endpoint backup solution that protects data without sacrificing productivity for today’s mobile workforce.

Susan Richardson, Manager/Content Strategy, Code42

[Cloud Security Alliance Blog]