So, your I.T. firm is doing backups. Of course they are. Everyone says they do backups, but no one really checks them. The “set it and forget it” promise only works if someone is watching the backup results. Who is watching yours?

Monitoring your backups is the one thing your I.T. firm can do that can make the biggest improvement in your technology situation for the least amount of money and hassle.

Most modern backup programs will send you an email on success or failure. Make sure your I.T. firm sets that up and tests it. Send the backup results to yourself or the I.T. administrator—better yet, both.

It is important to ensure that your I.T. firm uses top-of-the-line backup programs that are monitored on a console. For the clients we work with, I can see the results of hundreds of backup jobs in just a few seconds: success shows up in green, failure in red, and warnings in yellow.

Are your backups kept on site or off site? If your backups are not being sent to cloud storage, make sure you have a recent backup set off site. Otherwise, you will have no way to recover from a disaster.

Knowing what to back up is critical. Imagine spending thousands of dollars on the right backup program, data storage, and I.T. expertise to set it up, but when the day comes to recover a corrupted file, your I.T. firm tells you, “Well, we thought we were backing up that data, but it’s not there.” Recovery from this is painful—hours of looking through reports, re-entering data, calling banks, digging through boxes of invoices. All because backups were not checked and verified.

A backup check consists of doing a restore of a critical business file to confirm the backups are working. Scheduled backup checks are a simple thing to do, but only firms that practice Wellness I.T. implement them.

It should be obvious how critical good backups are, right? Your company is your data. You lose that, and you are out of business or have to pay thousands to try to recover from your losses.