The fast-rising mountain of IoT data doesn’t exist in isolation. It all has to be stored and processed somewhere—on servers and storage devices in businesses, in the cloud, and, increasingly, in homes. That’s why all of those newly connected devices represent new vulnerabilities to data loss due to system failures, accidents, hackers, and viruses. And these vulnerabilities all boil down to one main risk factor: the possibility of crucial data becoming unavailable.

What happens when a wind farm is unable to adjust output in response to renewable energy prices going negative, which can happen in California’s volatile energy market? Or, because of missing data, a plant manager’s smartphone can’t report that a motor on an industrial crane is about to burn out? Fortunately, with robust backup solutions in place, nothing much—the interruption in the flow of data is minimal.