Despite interacting with data on a daily — if not hourly — basis, a lot of business owners don’t think about how much of it there is… until it’s gone.
Anyone that has ever lost data knows the feeling. Your stomach drops. You try to figure out what could have gone wrong, and what this downtime will cost your store. You start googling how to fix the problem.
Sometimes, it’s an easy fix. But a lot of SaaS platforms these days operate under the Shared Responsibility Model, which means things like individual store data belong to the business, and as a result, it is their responsibility to back it up.
Check out the full breakdown of the
Shared Responsibility Model below. As you’ll see, data (including backups) is the responsibility of the customer.
So what’s the worst that can happen? That depends on a few things.
Every store is different, so the best way to find out the damage data loss could cause for your store is to use tools like
Rewind's Downtime Cost Calculator to figure out if having an automatic backup is worth it for you.
There’s no shortage of causes behind data loss. Sometimes it’s as simple as people making mistakes, deleting individual products or even entire catalogues. Third-party applications can go wrong and corrupt information. Or, at the worst of times,
businesses can fall victim to malicious attacks and cybercrime.
We assume everything is backed up in the cloud, but the reality is that all of the work that makes up your business could be gone in seconds. According to a major report by Oracle & the analyst firm ESG,
49% of organizations who used SaaS tools encountered data loss.
The direct impact of data loss isn’t always obvious. The true cost of downtime will hit you over days and weeks as you find more and more things that you lost when your store went down.
If products get removed from your store, you lose out on new customers for every minute they’re missing. Julia Friesen, Ecommerce Merchandising Manager at Knix.com puts it simply: “If our store went down, we’re looking at thousands of orders that can’t be placed.”
But not only will you lose out on new orders, you’ll also lose out on time. It can take hours, if not weeks or even months to manually restore all the data you lose. It took you time to make your business what it is today, and it will take time to get it back on track. Some of the data you lose may not be possible to recover; if you haven’t saved copies of all your product images you’ll have to take new ones. If you take a long time to get things back to the way they were, your SEO rankings could take a hit.
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