There's always a risk of disgruntled employees doing things like this. I'm not 100% certain offline backups would prevent going out of business either. A mass

There's always a risk of disgruntled employees doing things like this. I'm not 100% certain offline backups would prevent going out of business either. A mass exodus of customers from the extensive down time plus inevitable loss of recent data is catastrophic for a mature business in more maintenance than growth mode. At one of my early sysadmin jobs decades ago, a few weeks into the position an ex-employee broke into the network and wiped the partition tables and whatever else was in the first megabyte of the disks - usually some of the root fs, on all the ~1000 shared hosting servers. That was a very long week of headaches, and the business never fully recovered. There were offline tape backups, but they were of filesystems not disk images so we didn't have a backup of the MBR/partition tables. There also wasn't a high throughput restore mechanism. It was a minimal single enterprise-class tape drive with a small robot changer holding 10 tapes at a time. Sufficient for asynchronous backups and selective restores over NFS but not at all sufficient for restoring the entire datacenter from tapes in a timely fashion.