Ever taken a cheap auto insurance and got a really bad service when you got into an accident? The value of a good insurance company will only be reflected when you have to file a claim. Until then, it will look like money down the drain.
Your back up is somewhat like that. As long as you are not required to do a recovery, your cheapest back up service will look as good as the most expensive one. The real deal is when you have to recover something important, especially situations like ransomware. Here is a real customer horror story.
Customer was a prime target for ransomware because the employees are mostly non-technical who will easily click on any phishing e-mail. Customer already was target of spear phishing and had lost money in the past.
Customer was proposed a backup solution that included on-premises as well as cloud backup. But a cost driven decision drove the customer to opt for a cloud only backup solution.
One bad morning customer got hit with ransomware. Bad players encrypted 4 TB of shared folder which was critical for customer operation. Not a single employee could function without the file share. We had multiple good backups to download from. However, the time it took to download 4 TB of data was outrageous. The download speed of the back provider was so slow that it took 32 hours to download 4TB. To make things worse, download failed during first attempt after 26 hours and was required to download again taking another 32 hours.
All this was done while negotiating with the bad folks, parallelly trying to decrypt the files and isolating all other devices in the network. Finally, all the systems were restored, and business was back to normal. But in the process, customer lost 2 full weeks of productivity, between isolating, triaging, recovering, validating and bring everything back online.
With 110 employees, two weeks of lost productivity turned out to be more than $200,000 in cost to the customer in addition to $22,000 to recovery services.
Backup is like your insurance policy. Make sure you get one that covers you when you are really in need of it.
