A large chunk of us rely on cloud storage to backup our photos, videos, documents, and other files that are precious to us. It’s become so engrained in our lives that we take it for granted, and largely, it’s a reliable service. But despite the pros of cloud – and there are many - your data is only 99.9% safe.

Old fashioned human error is the biggest problem with data loss in the cloud, like with all forms of storage media, including hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid state drives (SSDs). Last year, for example, 123-reg accidentally deleted 67 servers. Admittedly, this was only 67 out of their 115,000 servers located in Europe, and it only affected a handful of clients. Despite cloud technology coming on leaps and bounds over the last five years or so, downtime is still inevitable.

But after inevitable downtime, data breaches are perhaps the biggest challenge when it comes to a company deciding whether to implement cloud storage. The cloud, by its very nature, can be accessed anywhere; and holds vast amounts of data. Because of this, it can be an appealing target for hackers. It can also be difficult for IT managers to track who has access, and the level of access they should have i.e. from when and where. Lax security is also a major problem and one of the biggest cause of data loss – the celebrity iCloud hacks that have been in the media over recent years were largely the result of poor account security.