A disaster can take many forms, from a raging snowstorm to deleting the wrong file. Regardless of what kind of disaster you face, you can know that it doesn’t take much to impact a business, especially if the business doesn’t have a business continuity plan in place. How does your business recover from such a devastating scenario? How can it get its data back and in proper working order? That’s what we want to tell you about today.
Data recovery is a major pain point for small businesses, but not all organizations have the same resources and assets that make it possible. Small businesses in particular are more prone to forego data backup and disaster recovery because it does not provide an immediate return on investment. Well, we’re here to tell you that this mindset is wrong.
Businesses these days practically need to expect disaster, as even the most careful and calculated security practices could result in a data disaster. Some businesses don’t fear for their data enough, and this leads them to neglect planning for threats such as hackers, natural disasters, and user error. As the business owner, you need to stay informed about how best to handle these situations.
What would you do if your business were suddenly struck by something which threatened its very existence? Do you have a plan to make sure that your business survives well past the expiration date assigned by natural disasters, hardware failure, user error, or hacking attacks? One of the most important parts of running a business is managing risk, and implementing a business continuity plan is a great way to focus on the preservation of your organization.
No business owner likes to think about it, but every business needs to be prepared for the possibility of their data disappearing. Have you taken steps to ensure that, should some disaster strike, you will be prepared to dust yourself off and continue operations? Furthermore, are you sure that your preparations will be sufficient and your data will be preserved?
The terms “disaster” and “data disaster” are too often used interchangeably. While definitely connected, they certainly are not the same thing. A “disaster” is a weather event or some other external force that puts your business in peril, often by leading to a “data disaster,” which is when your organization suffers data loss of some magnitude.
However, a business doesn’t necessarily need to undergo a full-blown disaster to experience a data disaster. A data disaster can be caused by events that, at first glance, seem much more manageable than physically destructive. Data disasters can be brought upon a company if a crucial piece of hardware fails, as well as hacking attacks or the unnervingly common user error.
Make no mistake, there is nothing inherently manageable about these circumstances. They can cause significant destruction to your business. It's your responsibility to be certain that your business continuity plan has a backup solution is prepared for whatever type of disaster may be headed your way. However, what many would consider a “backup solution” is simply insufficient.
In order for a backup solution to be safely reliable, it has to meet a few criteria:
Remember, these are the basics of data backup, which should only be a part of a comprehensive business continuity plan. Preserving your data is a good start, but in the case of some catastrophe, you’ll need a plan to get your business up and running again.
For assistance in creating a data backup and disaster recovery strategy, reach out to The Connection, Inc at (732) 291-5938.
Some organizations want to better understand the process that they use to take backups of their data and restore them in the event of an emergency. This is great, because the value of being able to do so cannot (and should not) be understated. A proper data backup and disaster recovery system could be all that stands between prosperity and failure.
Let’s consider a hypothetical disaster scenario. Your office is struck by a fire due to some sort of unforeseen circumstance. Maybe an outlet is overloaded and stray sparks start a small fire, which quickly evolves into a raging inferno. You evacuate your building, so all of your employees are safe and sound, but can the same be said for your technology? Even if the fire is quickly contained, if your networking equipment or server is damaged, you are looking at a major downtime event--especially if you don’t have data backup.
The same can be said for any sort of natural disaster. Floods, hurricanes, and lightning can all cause irreparable damage to your infrastructure, and unless you’re very careful with how you manage your data, you could lose everything that you’ve worked so hard to retain over the years. What is the best way to make sure that your organization survives not just ordinary circumstances, like hardware failure, but extraordinary ones like the aforementioned natural disasters?
The key is in your data backup and disaster recovery plan. Some small businesses might already have one put into place, but it’s likely that they aren’t up to par with the current needs of enterprise-level backup systems. Magnetic tape backup--the long-standing industry standard--has plenty of flaws which make it unappealing. For one, they can only be taken at the end of the day, or during a time when office is closed. The reason for this is that they are particularly resource-intensive, and taking them during the workday would have a negative effect on your ability to conduct business. Furthermore, since tape backups are only taken at the end of the day, you’ll be losing an entire day’s worth of data in the event of a disaster. Consumer-grade USB hard drives aren’t a good fit either, because they can easily be lost, stolen, or ignored, and your backup is only as good as its relevance.
That’s not even mentioning what would happen if you stored your tape backups on-site. A fire isn’t discriminatory in regards to what it destroys. It will devour both employee workstations and tape backups alike if given the opportunity. Furthermore, a hacking attack on your infrastructure could render any digitally-stored backups useless due to corruption or theft. Therefore, the most logical way to handle this issue is to simply store your data backups off-site. But how can you rapidly restore your backups following a disaster if they are nowhere near your site of operations?
A solution that puts an end to all of these woes is a cloud-based backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solution from The Connection, Inc. BDR takes smaller backups as often as every 15 minutes to ensure that data loss is minimal, and it accomplishes this by taking backups of only files that have changed since the last backup was taken. This puts less strain on your infrastructure and protects your business’ continuity. Furthermore, you eliminate the risk of user error, since BDR takes these backups automatically without the need for someone to set the tape at the end of the day. Last but not least, your BDR stores your backups in secure, offsite data centers, as well as in the cloud, so that you can rapidly recover in the event of a disaster. Plus, since the BDR device itself can replicate your server, you don’t have to worry about replacement hardware as quickly, meaning that you can get right back to work with minimal downtime. It’s just one way that enterprise-level technology solutions can help your small or medium-sized business thrive.
To get started with BDR today, reach out to The Connection, Inc at (732) 291-5938.
The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and there is no exception when it comes to your business technology. No matter how well-thought-out your systems are, you are always at a risk of some unforeseen threat causing havoc. In order to truly be prepared for anything, you need to implement a backup and disaster recovery solution for your business.
Data loss could result from any of a variety of situations. Equipment could malfunction and depending on what device it was that failed, you could be out a sizable chunk of critical data. There’s also the risk of damage that a natural disaster could potentially cause to these systems as well. Fire, flooding, earthquakes, electrical storms, any and all of these events could pose some threat against your data. There is also the ever-present danger of user error, as any of your employees could potentially delete or overwrite something critical by mistake.
Data loss is no laughing matter, either. While other variables factor in as well, statistics have overwhelmingly displayed a tendency for companies who suffer from data loss to go out of business within a year or two of the incident.
In light of this, businesses clearly need a method of protecting their futures against the possibility of fire, failure, or Fred’s faux pas. Fortunately, that method exists in a backup and disaster recovery solution.
A critical component to any business continuity strategy, a BDR solution can help you to ensure that should your business fall victim to a data-loss disaster, you have the capability to not only recover your backed-up data, but also restore your systems to full operational capacity. Best practices dictate that this solution be located offsite and isolated from your systems, in order to ensure that the disaster that destroys your original data does not affect the backup as well.
To best accomplish this end, a BDR solution should feature a cloud-based implementation. This approach allows for backups to be taken automatically at multiple times throughout the day, and for the backed-up data to be safely distanced from its originating location.
The Connection, Inc has the ability to assist you in compiling a business continuity plan, just in case something doesn’t go well somewhere along the line. To start the process of reinforcing your business against disastrous data loss, call (732) 291-5938 today.
How much thought have you honestly put into your business’s data recovery procedure? It’s likely that you, like many other businesses out there, are taking a minimalist approach with both your data backup and disaster recovery. It’s not that you aren’t aware that they’re a good thing; you might just feel that you don’t need it because you feel hackers have no reason to compromise your data. Unfortunately, that’s what hackers are counting on: complacency.
It’s the goal of every IT administrator for every part of their network to run smoothly. Achieving this level of IT perfection is a beautiful thing that makes the job of everyone in the company easier. Unfortunately, all it takes is one component to fail for this dream of IT utopia to come crashing down.
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