"It is said that data is the lifeblood of a business, which makes it concerning that  research shows 85 percent of IT systems are not backed up, especially when 91 percent of businesses have experienced an IT outage in a 24-month window," said Marvin Blough, StorageCraft's vice president of worldwide sales. "During Small Business Week, we emphasize that organizations need to be prepared for ransomware and other IT outage threats with a strong business continuity plan that features a fast, reliable backup and disaster recovery solution."

For more than 12 years, StorageCraft® Technology Corp. has been providing businesses, both small and large, with backup and disaster recovery solutions to maintain access to data and mission-critical systems. The award-winning StorageCraft Recovery Solution(TM) is trusted by IT professionals to protect millions of systems around the world. Small businesses also find comfort in working with members of the StorageCraft Partner Network, which is comprised of resellers and managed service providers (MSPs), who are contracted by businesses to handle IT needs.

Ransomware is an increasingly dangerous form of malware that encrypts data and makes it unrecoverable unless a ransom is paid. According to the FBI, there were more than 2,400 reported ransomware attacks in 2015 totaling more than $24 million, with ransoms paid during the first quarter of 2016 surpassing $200 million.

future Vision, inc. in Raleigh, N.C., is a StorageCraft MSP partner that trusts StorageCraft to protect its clients' data. In recent weeks, future Vision has used StorageCraft ShadowProtect to quickly help several clients avoid the dreadful decision of paying the ransom or allowing the data to be deleted.

future Vision Network Engineer Christopher Thompson gave an account of how one attack was dealt with while using StorageCraft ShadowProtect. "Once the customer informed us of the ransomware attack, and when they were last able to use those files, we were immediately able to start mounting backups and determine within the hour when the threat happened," Thompson said. "Then, within 10 minutes, we had the last 'healthy' drive mounted and data replaced to the shared folder that was originally infected."

Another StorageCraft MSP partner that has seen an increase of ransomware attacks is INTELITECHS in Salt Lake City. INTELITECHS Owner Jake Hiller pointed out the damage caused by ransomware and other threats to business continuity in general will go beyond just data loss because of the associated costs such as recovery, downtime and the negative impact on reputation.

"A good backup is data insurance. If a small business lost some or all of its data in one-fell-swoop, no other traditional insurance policy is going to be able to help," Hiller said. "You will need a good backup and disaster recovery solution like StorageCraft."