Every business runs on data. Data has become the nerve center of a successful, growing organization—sending signals across teams, telling decision-makers what their next best steps could be.

In our most recent article of this series, we talked about Acumatica’s commitment to keeping your data safe with advanced security measures at both the application and infrastructure levels. We also talked about Acumatica’s dedication to making sure your data is accessible to you anytime, anywhere, 24/7/365. That commitment extends even further.

Because it is so core to the functioning of your business, data is a sacred trust. It’s information that is fundamental to your company operations, and it’s also information that your customers have entrusted to you. Acumatica takes this trust to heart and believes that all businesses have the right to control their data and how they manage it at all times. Our customers own their own data. Period.

Owning your own data seems like an obvious right that all customers have and a right that all software vendors stand behind and defend. However, there are many vendors that establish roadblocks to data access, making it difficult to retrieve information, particularly when a company would like to transition to a new business management system—but also when that company just needs to restore data that has been lost.

The Acumatica Cloud ERP system helps you store, access, use, analyze, record, and make decisions based on your data. But that doesn’t mean your data suddenly becomes our data. It means we provide you the tools to help you manage it—to analyze and use it; we keep it secure from cyberattacks; and we generate backups to protect it from natural disasters. But the data is always yours.

Acumatica believes this is foundational to building trust-based relationships with the customers our software serves, and it is core to who we are as a company.

Here is how we fulfill this promise.

Your Data: Always Accessible, Always Yours

To keep your data secure and accessible, Acumatica’s software as a service (SaaS) licensing provides two different methods of data backup: automated backups and database snapshots. Acumatica continuously, and at no extra charge, backs up your data, securing it on four different retention schedules:

1. Daily backups are retained for four days.
2. The last backup of each week is retained for four weeks.
3. The backup taken on the last day of the month is retained for four months.
4. The last backup of the quarter is retained for one year.

These full backups are performed every day, and incremental backups of transaction logs are saved frequently throughout the day. Acumatica’s optional backup access service gives you anytime access to seven days of rolling backups.

The database snapshots feature allows you to take your own snapshots of your entire company, save them to the Acumatica database, download them to your local workstation, and restore them at a later date if needed. These snapshots can easily be applied using the “Restore” feature in the Acumatica interface.

If something happens and you can’t access Acumatica’s automatic backups or restore a snapshot yourself, you can contact your partner, who will work with Acumatica to evaluate your situation and help you retrieve your data for a very small service fee—around 3% to 6% of what other vendors regularly charge.

And you will always have access to your data in a usable, SQL format. Acumatica will never give it to you in a flat file prone to data redundancy and lacking database relationships and constraints.

ERP vendors holding customer data hostage happens too often in the industry. Frequently, customers are dissatisfied with vendors who don’t share Acumatica’s commitment to honest data ownership practices. One such customer is Mozaic.

Data Set Free by Acumatica

Mozaic, a nonprofit based in New York State, is part of The Arc—which is “the largest national community-based organization advocating for and with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD).” Mozaic was formed from the merger of two Arc organizations—one serving Yates County and the other serving Seneca and Cayuga Counties.

Both organizations were running on legacy ERP systems: Yates on Microsoft Dynamics and Seneca Cayuga on Sage. At the time of the merger, Yates had already switched to Acumatica and was bringing Seneca Cayuga onboard.

However, at the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns, and exactly one day before Acumatica was scheduled to go live across the whole Mozaic organization, the nonprofit was hit by a ransomware attack. The attack took all but three servers completely offline, and every program was affected—except for Acumatica. Hosted in the cloud, Acumatica was secure and untouched. However, the Seneca Cayuga data was still stored with Sage in on-premises servers. When Tammy Raub, CFO of Mozaic, contacted Sage to access the company’s data, she was told her only choice was to pay $20,000 for a new version of the program. She says: “Sage held us hostage. They wouldn’t even give us the older version to load. So, it’s like we were hit with ransomware twice.”

Miraculously, a consultant was able to restore the Seneca Cayuga data without Mozaic having to pay the Sage fee or the ransom to the cybercriminal.

But this situation would never have happened if Seneca Cayuga had already been using Acumatica. Their data, too, would have remained untouched. And, on the off chance that information had been lost, Acumatica would have helped Mozaic retrieve it. Because it’s their data.

Conclusion

To operate efficiently, you need to own and control your business’s data at all times. You shouldn’t be faced with the fear and uncertainty that you may one day be forced to stop operations because an ERP vendor has set up roadblocks to your data access. You shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not your data is actually yours. With Acumatica, that will never be a concern.

To learn more about how Acumatica will guard your data, contact our experts. Our next blog in this series will be coming soon!