US Air Force lost a decade of data. How are your backups?

TORONTO - June 20, 2016 - PRLog -- The US Air Force lost a decade of data due to a corrupted database and backups. They reported more than 100,000 files missing. How are your backups?

According to the release, the database was corrupted last month and Lockheed Martin (http://www.lockheedmartin.com/) has spent two weeks trying to recover data before notifying the Air Force (https://www.airforce.com/) on June 6. The database was populated with data and information about current investigations as well as all records related to Inspector General (IG) (http://www.af.mil/InspectorGeneralComplaints.aspx) complaints.

The US Air Force has turned to the Pentagon's team of cybersecurity professionals and as of Wednesday, they have found the data but it will require extensive data recovery efforts. There is no guarantee on recovery and the US Air Force will continue into its investigation.

So the US Air Force lost a decade of data. Why were there no data backups?

We cannot stress this enough, data backup is one of the most important areas of your company and cannot be ignored. Data is a crucial part of your business and essential to your business continuity plan.

Why you should backup?

Well, it will allow you to avoid issues such as this one as data loss can happen in many ways.  The most common causes of data loss come down to physical failure of hardware, accidental deletes, theft or disasters like fire and flood. A continual attack from cyber criminals and hackers has cause computer viruses and malware to become a larger risk to business information as once they have infected your machine, they often delete or corrupt your data.

What data should you backup?

You need to evaluate your entire company and directory. You need to choose what business critical data to backup.  You need to evaluate how long it will take to restore your data in case of emergency as well as what would happen if you cannot get the backup back.

The US Air Force lost a decade of data. It does not mean your business should suffer the same issue. Discuss your data backups and disaster recovery with your IT department or trusted IT support services partner.

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