Colin Middleton’s series on what Business Owners and Senior Management should know about IT continues with a business necessity… Back Ups.
If everything disappeared today, what happens next?
Imagine arriving at work tomorrow and discovering you can’t access anything.
Your emails are gone. Customer documents have disappeared. Finance files can’t be opened. HR records are unavailable. The shared folders your team uses every day are empty.
How long would your business be able to operate?
More importantly, how quickly could you get everything back?
It’s a scenario most business owners would rather not think about, but it leads to one of the simplest and most important IT questions you can ask:
“If we lost everything today, how quickly could we recover?”
You don’t need to understand the technicalities of backups. But you should know the answer to that question.
What Actually Needs Backing Up?
When we talk about backups, most people immediately think about documents and spreadsheets.
But consider everything your business relies on during a normal working day.
Emails and calendars. Customer records. HR and payroll information. Finance documents. Shared files. Databases. Business applications.
Some of this information may be stored on computers, some on servers and increasingly, much of it will be in cloud services.
The important thing is knowing what information is critical to your business and whether you could recover it if it disappeared.
“But Everything Is in Microsoft 365…”
This is an increasingly common assumption.
If your files are in Microsoft 365, OneDrive or SharePoint, they’re in the cloud—so they’re backed up, right?
Not necessarily.
Cloud platforms have various protections and recovery options built in, but that doesn’t mean every piece of data is protected indefinitely against every scenario.
Files can still be accidentally deleted. Accounts can be compromised. Data can be overwritten or deliberately removed. Retention periods can also expire before anyone realises something is missing.
The same principle applies to other cloud applications. Cloud storage and a dedicated backup aren’t necessarily the same thing.
The question isn’t simply “Are we in the cloud?”
It’s “If something disappears from the cloud, can we get it back?”
It Doesn’t Take a Disaster
The word “backup” can conjure up images of ransomware attacks, major system failures or other worst-case scenarios.
But sometimes the cause is much more ordinary.
An employee accidentally deletes an important folder.
Someone overwrites a spreadsheet containing months of work.
A laptop containing locally stored documents fails.
An employee leaves and their account—and the information associated with it—is removed.
Or yes, a cyberattack encrypts or deletes business data.
In each case, the cause is different, but the business question is the same:
Can we recover, and how long will it take?
A Backup Is Only Useful If You Can Restore It
Having a backup is reassuring.
Knowing it works is much more important.
Imagine being told after an incident that backups haven’t been running properly for six months. Or discovering that the system was backing up some files—but not the ones you need.
That’s why backups should be monitored and, importantly, recovery should be tested.
You don’t need to know how that’s done technically. That’s the job of whoever looks after your IT.
But as a business owner, you should be confident that someone is doing it.
Ask the Question
The next time you speak to whoever manages your IT, ask them:
“If we lost our systems and data today, what could we recover—and how long would it take?”
You should get a clear answer.
Not technical jargon. Not “we should be okay.”
A clear explanation of what is protected, where the backups are held and how your business would recover.
Because backups aren’t really an IT issue.
They’re a business continuity issue.
Hopefully, you’ll never need to rely on them. But if the worst does happen, that is not the moment you want to discover what was—or wasn’t—being backed up.
Article written by Advo’s Colin Middleton