3 ways to protect your small business's applications

Cybercriminals actively target businesses of every size, knowing that even a brief disruption can have a major impact on operations and revenue. They rely on a wide range of tactics—from sophisticated phishing and social engineering campaigns to exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities—to quietly gain a foothold in your environment. Once inside, they can deploy ransomware to encrypt servers, endpoints, and shared storage, effectively locking a small business out of its own data and bringing critical applications to a sudden standstill.

What's more, cyberattackers aren't the only threat to small-business applications. Every day operational risks can be just as disruptive. A failed software update, a faulty hard drive, a power surge, or an overheating server in a closet with poor ventilation can all bring line-of-business systems to a halt.

If an on-premises server experiences a technical issue, a business can miss out on an entire day of productivity while IT scrambles to solve the problem, field support tickets, and coordinate with vendors for replacement hardware or parts. In environments with limited IT staff, even a “minor” issue can quickly snowball into delayed customer deliveries, missed appointments, and lost revenue.

Protecting Small Business Applications and Data

Technical glitches and hiccups may be inevitable, but they don't have to wreak havoc on business applications and data with the help of these three assets:

1. File restore tools

Whether it’s a targeted cyberattack, accidental deletion, or simple user error, small businesses need a reliable way to quickly recover lost or corrupted data. The right restore tools allow you to recover at whatever level of detail the situation requires—from bringing an entire system back online to restoring a single, business‑critical document.

Granular, single‑file restore capabilities are especially important. Instead of having to roll back an entire server or restore a full backup set, IT can rapidly locate and recover exactly the item that was lost—a contract, a patient record, a critical spreadsheet, or a single email—minimizing downtime and disruption for end users. As noted in a recent blog post, 80 percent of recovery cases NovaBACKUP sees require only one file to be restored from a backup.

At the end of the day, a business application is only as valuable as the data that enables it to perform mission‑critical functions. In many recovery scenarios, that “mission‑critical” data might be just one spreadsheet or one small database file. It’s not the size or the quantity of data that matters most, but the significance of the information to your operations—and having restore tools that can bring that information back exactly when you need it.

CryptoLocker and other nasty strains of ransomware can render essential data useless.

2. Backup and disaster recovery

Industry research shows that roughly one in four small businesses never fully recovers after a major disruption. Disasters can take many forms—from natural events to internal mistakes or targeted cyberattacks—but the impact is the same: if you can’t quickly restore access to critical applications and the data behind them, operations can grind to a halt. That’s why every small business needs a reliable way to maintain continuity of access to the systems and information that keep the organization running.

The reality is that you can’t anticipate or prevent every scenario that might put a small business network at risk. To make matters worse, recent research indicates that a majority of IT professionals lack confidence in their ability to reliably recover data when something does go wrong. Hope is not a strategy—without a tested recovery plan, it’s far too easy for your business to become another statistic.

The good news is that even if an entire network goes down—whether from a ransomware attack, hardware failure, or an office fire—a well‑designed backup and disaster recovery strategy can keep your business from losing everything. By maintaining current copies of critical application data on secure, off‑site storage or in the cloud, you ensure that even a worst‑case event doesn’t mean the end of operations for a small business.

3. Consult an experienced third party

A wide range of issues—from sophisticated cyberattacks and hardware failures to software conflicts and simple human error—can quickly take critical business applications offline and put vital company data at risk. When something goes wrong, small businesses need more than just backups; they need a clearly defined, realistically executable restoration strategy that aligns with their specific systems, compliance requirements, and recovery time objectives.

Yet many small organizations don’t have in‑house experts who live and breathe backup and recovery best practices. The good news is, they don’t have to. What matters is having a plan that has been thoughtfully designed, documented, and tested—one that spells out exactly how to restore key applications and data under different scenarios, who is responsible for each step, and what resources are required to get systems back online quickly and with minimal disruption.

This is where the expertise of an experienced third party, such as NovaBACKUP, can lend a hand. At the very least, it may be time to get a well-informed point of view. Your business applications and the data they're tied to could be at stake.