Guide to Data Recovery Services in Toronto

From processing financial operations to maintaining customer orders and info, all of your functions are tied to essential data that, if lost or stolen, can cripple your business. This is why data recovery services and planning must be a part of every comprehensive emergency plan and business continuity strategy.

In this guide, you will learn exactly what you need to do to protect your data and how you can implement a comprehensive data recovery plan that keeps your data and your clients’ data safe.

We’ll also go over what you can do right now if you just got hit with ransomware or experienced hardware failure and need emergency data recovery services in Toronto.

What Does Data Recovery and Data Protection Involve?

It’s important to understand that your data can be threatened both internally to your business and externally. Data loss can occur internally through things like a failed server backup in your office, or originate externally, such as when a hacker implements ransomware to encrypt and steal your business data. Data protection services and practices serve to prevent these things from happening in the first place, ensuring your data (and your customers’ data) remains protected and functional.

But what happens when companies have no data protection plan or policies in place to defend against IT threats and data loss? More often than not, companies face cyber breaches or other catastrophic events that leave data either inaccessible or unusable. This is when you need to contact professional cybersecurity and data recovery services in Toronto, like BSWI, who are equipped to recover and restore data. In this scenario, preventative measures have failed or were not in place at all, leaving the company at risk of losing all its essential data.

Data Loss Statistics

One of the biggest risks in modern business is cyber threats that can disrupt your business from the inside out. Chief among these threats is data loss. No less than 94% of companies close following catastrophic data loss due to sheer revenue drain and lost productivity dealing with the fallout. According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach in 2023 was over $4M, a 15% increase over the last three years.

If you’re a small business, you’re just as at risk as bigger corporations. In many ways, smaller organizations have a harder time recovering from catastrophic data loss, with 70% of small businesses closing within a year after a data loss event. This is why having data protection measures in place and access to data recovery services are so vital.

How Emergency Data Recovery Services Work

Before delving into how to fortify your data protection throughout your network, it’s important to understand that time is against you when it comes to data recovery. If you’ve discovered that you’ve been hacked or you have trouble backing up or restoring your data after equipment malfunctions, you need professional data recovery services immediately. Here’s the general process of working with data recovery specialists.

Isolating the Problem

It all starts with having a thorough conversation with your cyber professionals. At BSWI, our first priority is to understand what happened, what data is affected, and where the files are located on the drive. Another first step to data recovery is isolating the source of the data breach or technical issue. If it’s in your computer, and the issue is hardware-related, make sure your computer’s turned off so no further damage is done. If it’s a viral attack, we need to isolate the compromised account and prevent as much data from being compromised as possible. it’s vital to immediately run a diagnostic of what data might be affected and what might potentially be lost and needs to be recovered.

Defining Data Recovery Viability

Defining how bad your cyber breach or data incident is will be essential for saving time and money. For example, if it’s a hard drive failure, you may not be able to recover the data on your own at all. For our clients, we partner with a data recovery center to make technical repairs on damaged hard drives and recover the data.

If the data is threatened by a ransomware virus, however, there are two options for you. You either have to pay the ransom, in which case they will give you a key to unlock your data – if you’re lucky. Or you can fall back onto your data backup. While there are ways that professionals can recover some of the data, there is no guarantee of success. That said, you should always vet your data security and recovery services providers. If they guarantee total data recovery without reviewing the situation, that’s a red flag.

At BSWI, we prioritize transparency and focus on maximizing our customers’ time and money. We give clear estimates of time and costs for what we can do to recover your data based on your situation. Our team also works quickly to provide a list of actual files that are recoverable.

The Data Recovery Process

Once your IT professionals are briefed on the situation, they can go to work correcting the technical errors and restoring the data. They will run a suite of in-house data recovery tools that specialize in data restoration, then work to back up and otherwise recover the data you lost. If that doesn’t work, or if there is a physical issue with your hard drive, the team will take your unit to a specialized clean room. This allows data specialists to conduct a deep survey on your unit, following up with cleaning and/or repairing your unit in order to recover the data.

Data Recovery Time

The time for your data recovery can vary depending on your circumstances. If you have a large hard drive or a series of drives, it could take days. If it’s a small drive, or the breach was isolated and contained quickly in conjunction with having a backup system, the recovery can go quickly, perhaps within 24 hours. But again, this depends on the scale of your incident.

For example, we had one client using a program, Business Vision, to manage their year-end finances. This company had a data mishap when they overwrote their year-end finances, essentially doing the finances for the same year twice by mistake. Because the data was overwritten so thoroughly, recapturing the missing year-end data took considerable time. We had to rely on an idea recovery system to recover the information, but BSWI was able to restore the financial data after several days.

What can make the process go faster is how well you know your data and IT network. Any insight that you can provide your IT specialists on file names and their locations on the drive will help them be able to prioritize and remediate specific files. Another way to reclaim your data faster is to seek professional data recovery services first, not just support from a local computer or technology store.

One of our customers had a sudden hard drive failure on his computer, losing many personal pictures and information. He didn’t seek data recovery specialists first, instead entrusting a local computer store to fix the hard drive. They weren’t able to do so. In fact, the store actually lost part of the drive when they took it apart, which only worsened the situation.

Our team was brought in by the customer to work with the store to find and reclaim the original drive components. Once we reclaimed the original drive, and our team of specialists reassembled the unit, we were able to recover all the pictures for our client.

While the customer was fortunate that we could get to the source of his drive failure and recover his data, the situation was complicated and delayed simply because he didn’t involve data recovery professionals first. Therefore, your best bet for successful data recovery is to seek out professional help immediately when the incident occurs.

Don’t Attempt DIY Data Recovery

Never attempt data recovery yourself if you’re not completely sure of what you’re doing. More often than not, you risk making the problem worse, losing your data permanently, or corrupting other aspects of your IT system. BSWI has dealt with multiple situations locally in Toronto where the client first tried to recover the data themselves and then sought our aid after they were unable to do so.

Because of what these customers had done themselves – often using free, ineffective tools they downloaded for the job – by the time we attempted to restore their data, there was nothing we could do. Just a few problems that can occur from DIY data recovery include:

  • Hard drive degradation
  • Damaged hardware
  • Encryption issues
  • And more

Besides not having the technical skills, you probably lack the hardware and technologies needed to execute emergency data recovery. Therefore, seek professional data recovery services in Toronto immediately if you ever have a data issue.

Get Emergency Data Recovery Services Now: Call Us: 416-805-9296

Why a Data Recovery Plan is Critical for Small Businesses

Ideally, you don’t want to have to rely on emergency recovery services. Data loss prevention is far more cost-effective and essential for a sustainable, long-term business. Remember, the alternative to protecting your data effectively is potentially going out of business. Again, data is a major asset dictating the effectiveness of your organization. 79% of IT decision-makers consider data management and protection as a competitive business advantage. Therefore, you need a data recovery plan in place.

Building a 4-Step Data Recovery Plan

No one wants mission-critical data to be attacked, damaged, or lost, but when a cyber incident or disaster occurs, having the processes and technology in place to mitigate data loss and restore the data can save you time and money. This is the data recovery plan, a detailed plan of action to immediately respond to any data threats, guide recovery, and return to normalcy.

There are many components to a data recovery plan. What’s more, your data recovery plan will be unque to your business and focus on preventing and mitigating specific threats to your data. Let’s look at a few core components that should go into your data recovery plan.

1. Identifying threats

Your plan must incorporate multiple scenarios in which your data is threatened. Ransomware and cyber attacks are just one category of threat you need to prepare for. Data loss can also occur from operator error, perhaps when a staff member ran backups twice and one data set overwrote the other – as in our earlier example. After all, the second biggest cause of data loss is human error. Other risks include hard drive crashes and equipment failure, not to mention the threat of natural disasters. Your individual organization may have other, more unique data threats based on your industry.

2. Data Cataloging

You may not know the situation that forces you to protect your data, but you should know your data. Your data protection and data recovery plans should categorize the types of data you have and their importance and use within your organization. To ensure fast, thorough data recovery, it’s critical that you can identify the location and types of data effectively, so you can respond appropriately.

You should be asking what data you have, how important is it, how much of it is customer information (personal and financial data like credit card numbers), and what functions would be disrupted without the data. You might also have email correspondence you need to secure. All of this needs to be documented and backed up.

Another thing to note is that if you have clients, you might have confidential information that belongs to them in addition to their personal information. If have a data breach, you may be required to inform them of the incident.

3. Response Planning

When you’re facing a situation in which you’ve lost data, you cannot hesitate or come up with a plan on the fly. You need to execute the plan you’ve already made in order to save time, money, and reputation. Your data recovery plan must factor in the worst types of scenarios, the fallouts, and the actionable steps needed to overcome the incident and regain data.

For example, you need a plan in place to identify if your financial information is lost. If it is, your plan must bring on data recovery services as quickly as possible to target those files for remediation. You must make sure a plan is in place to identify where everything is and then make sure that’s backed up. Speaking of which – backing up all your data is highly important and the best way to ensure you can recover your most important information.

You also need to be prepared for if your business gets hacked. Look for the vulnerabilities within your network and data management. Be sure to examine what information is most vulnerable and desirable should a criminal target you for a cyber attack. To this extent, you should consider investing in a cybersecurity assessment to identify vulnerabilities to your data and IT network.

4. Optimizing Data Security with Cloud Backups

All the data recovery services Toronto has to offer will tell you that cloud backups and cloud-based technologies are the best way to secure your data. It’s been estimated that 93% of small companies have data or backups on the cloud and are significantly more prepared for data loss prevention thanks to cloud-based recovery tech. Benefits of cloud backups include:

  • Storing and backing up your data on the cloud does a few things for you:
  • Makes your data easier to access anywhere
  • Backups can be regulated and checked easily
  • Data is more secure

Air Gap and Cloud Backups

One thing that we always recommend to secure business data is what’s known as air gap backup systems. This refers to when your data is backed up on the cloud offsite from your physical office. This is a much more secure way to protect your data instead of relying solely on a drive in the office. Remember, hard drives can be lost or damaged, and need to be maintained. What if one of your team forgets to maintain the physical hard drive, causing your backups to fail? You would lose data that could have been restored thanks to regimented, hands-free cloud backups.

There are many options for remote servers to back up your data. You can get the data locally and store it in other locations around Canada. What’s more, cloud backups enable all the data to be encrypted. This means that you don’t have to worry about security as the information is being transferred back and forth. However, that doesn’t mean you can ignore cybersecurity with your data, or solely rely on having backups.

Data Security Tools and Services You Need

Your data recovery and protection plan must also include a robust security system. After all, these are the first lines of defense protecting private information from both criminals and system failures. On a surface level, you must consider what firewalls and antivirus systems you have in place guarding your IT network as a whole. These are the base layers of defense before data comes into jeopardy in the first place.

However, the reality is that antivirus and firewall solutions are not enough. There are other critical solutions you need to protect your data in our modern workplace.

EDR

One thing you’ll want to implement to increase cloud security is Endpoint Detection Response (EDR) software. This is important because it provides a level of protection above antivirus by actively monitoring end-user devices to detect cyber threats, including malware and ransomware that could hijack your data.

SIEM

You should also have dedicated Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) software in place to more accurately monitor for the kinds of network activity that can threaten your data’s security. This technology analyzes activities from many different resources across your entire IT infrastructure. Specifically, SIEMs look at all the actual logs throughout your various systems – such as firewall and antivirus software logs. And, in the case of data security, SIEMS monitor and analyze server logs – and all the data within. This is extremely useful because these logs are too numerous for a single person to look at. It just wouldn’t be cost-effective for anyone to do it individually. However, this software goes through and searches all those logs to determine whether there is a problem with your data and if there are any signs of tampering.

SOC

Technology alone won’t protect your data. In addition to an intelligent data protection plan incorporating all your threats, processes, and security tools, you still need support. Consider relying on a Security Operations Center (SOC) software and team for 24-hour data security support. This is a team of IT security professionals that monitors an organization’s entire IT infrastructure, detecting cybersecurity events in real-time and addressing them as quickly and effectively as possible. While some companies have an in-house SOC, many small businesses rely on cybersecurity specialists like BWSI to serve as their SOC, freeing their time and budget.

Say something happens in the middle of the night. Having a SOC service, in which seasoned cybersecurity professionals catch and resolve the threat at once, will save you from significant delays and costs, and also preserve your data all at once.

Test Your Data Recovery Plan

Testing your cybersecurity plans and data recovery processes is extremely important to ensure that you’re prepared to overcome certain scenarios like ransomware. This starts with educating your entire company on the procedures and parameters involved. You should even have a board meeting to inform board members of what cybersecurity measures are in place, the data security procedures being taken, and data recovery services on standby in the event of a breach or data incident.

From here, test your security measures. Whether you do this once a month or once per quarter, consistency is key. Make sure nothing is missing in your network security and that you are aware of where your data is located and backed up. Maintaining data backups is also very important for emergency readiness. A part of testing your data protection plan should be verifying that backups are working and up-to-date. To make sure your backups and data recovery plans are truly comprehensive, consider working with an outside third-party cybersecurity firm to help you test and improve your data protection.

Consider Professional Data Security and Data Recovery Services

Creating a data recovery plan for your business isn’t just an expense, it’s an investment for your business’s future. By minimizing the risks to your data, you’ll not only save time and money but also empower your business operations as a whole.

Whether you require data recovery services in the Toronto area or are looking for an effective way to manage and protect your data, BSWI’s veteran staff of data recovery and cybersecurity specialists are ready to help. Call us at 416-805-9296 to schedule your free consultation.

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