Tag: Backup

Categories
Casserly Consulting Blog

How to Be Selective when Picking a Backup Solution

what_you_need_backup_400.jpg

You literally never know when your data may be lost. It may be frightening to consider, but there are so many factors that could lead to you losing your data, ranging from an act of nature to user error. To counter this, you need to make sure your backup solution meets certain requirements. Today, we’ll review those requirements.

What Does Your Company Need from Its Backup?
Your backup, in many ways, should be your company’s saving grace. Whatever the cause of your data loss may be, the loss itself creates a significant issue in and of itself. Buildings can be repaired, equipment can be replaced, but once data is gone, it is practically impossible to retrieve it without some kind of backup in place.

Therefore, it is important for your backup to meet certain benchmarks:

  • How quickly can data be backed up?
  • How quickly can data be restored?
  • How badly could your operations be interrupted in the interim?
  • How protected is my backup against its own disasters, especially the same ones that could influence the data I have stored in-house?

What Kind of Data Backup Best Fits My Needs?
There are a few kinds of backup solutions available, and while it may not be a bad idea to maintain multiple forms of backup in a hybrid approach, we always recommend that your backup strategy revolve around the use of a cloud backup solution. The reasons for this are simple: a cloud solution can be automated, eliminating the risk of user error leading to a backup not being refreshed, and your data is kept in multiple locations, adding the protection of redundancy.

How Can I Get Started with a Backup Solution?
In order to really begin with a backup solution that fits the requirements we’ve reviewed, it is best to go through a reputable vendor. COMPANYNAME can help with that – not only do we have good working relationships with a variety of reputable vendors, we’ll act as your representative with them, ensuring that you get what you need for your business’ benefit.

For more information about backups and how to go about implementing one, give us a call at PHONENUMBER.

Categories
Casserly Consulting Blog

Prepping For A Weather Event Needs To Happen In Your Business

continuity_plans_keep_business_alive_400.jpg

Running a business requires the ability to stay in control, especially when others couldn’t. However, there are some situations–like major weather events–that simply will not be controlled. In cases like these, you need to make sure your business is prepared to withstand the worst. A business continuity plan can help you do so.

A business continuity plan is a comprehensive strategy that, when enacted, will allow business operations to continue despite some detrimental circumstance that would have otherwise derailed them. For example, a lightning strike killing the power to your office building, a flood leaving it inaccessible, or a hurricane wiping your place of business off the map–any of these events would severely hinder, if not halt, your ability to do business if you are not prepared.

In short, without a business continuity plan in place, you’re vulnerable to chance–a risk that no business owner should take if they can help it. That is why it is so important to have a plan before it’s needed.

The first step to creating a plan is to establish what that plan needs to address. To do this, you will need to identify where your greatest losses would be if disaster befell your business. What would the costs be if you were to suddenly lose all business function? How would the additional expenses of a disaster influence your cash flow? How long would it take you to recover? This is what is known as a Business Impact Analysis, and it can help you to prioritize your most pressing concerns to ensure they make it into the plan.

Your plan should address the following six considerations:

  1. Establish the plan’s reach
  2. Identify your key business areas
  3. Establish which business functions are critical
  4. Outline which business areas and functions are interdependent
  5. Establish a limit to how much downtime each function can experience
  6. Plan to continue operations

Once your plan is developed and documented, with responsibilities properly distributed, you need to train your staff and test the procedures that were just laid out.

Of course, you also need to be sure that your data is preserved, despite what may happen to your in-house equipment. A reliable backup solution is an integral part of any business continuity strategy. This backup should be incrementally updated throughout the day, and preferably, hosted in the cloud. At the very least, it needs to be in a disparate location than your original data, as a backup that is destroyed along with the original data will do you no good.

Unfortunately, we can’t control the weather. We can, however, control how we prepare for it. COMPANYNAME can help you put solutions in place to protect your business-essential data. Call PHONENUMBER for more.

Categories
Technology

4 Options for Backing Up Your Data. Which is Best?

b2ap3_thumbnail_backup_and_recovery_400.jpg It’s every business owner’s worst nightmare; they wake up to find out that their entire data infrastructure has been wiped out by some unexpected natural disaster or hacking attack. The only way to guarantee that your business’s future remains intact is to have some sort of data backup and recovery system, just in case of the worst.

However, if you’re unfamiliar with data backup solutions, you might not know where to start. We’ve outlined several options that your business has, as well as which ones are the superior choice.

Local Data Backup
Most organizations will immediately think of local data backup as their first option. While it’s a great way to avoid the risks of not having any data backup at all, keep in mind that it’s far from the ideal solution. Two types of local data backup solutions are magnetic tape and external hard drives. These allow you to keep a copy of your business’s data on-site in the event of a disaster, but it’s not a guarantee if you want to ensure the recovery of your data.

Imagine for a moment that your business was struck by a disaster so great that it eliminated pretty much everything that your organization had stored in your office. Fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, or floods all have this destructive capability. If this were to happen, your organization would be left without a trace of data to go off of. Furthermore, you also run the risk of malware infections, user error, or hardware failure when hosting your data backups on-site.

So… what’s the next best thing?

Cloud Backup
The next logical step would be to host your data off-site, and the cloud allows for just that. If your in-house infrastructure were to be rendered obsolete or incapacitated by some sort of disaster, you could restore your data quickly and efficiently through the use of a cloud backup and restoration process. Plus, you can forget about the potential user error that could arise from having to manually set and restore through tape backups.

Multiple Data Center Backups
Before going all-in on a cloud-based backup, you should ask them how many data centers that they use to store your data. Ultimately, you want your organization’s data to be stored in as many different locations as possible, as this improves the odds that your data can be located and restored. Basically, if the data can’t be found in one data center due to some sort of internal problem, you’ll know with certainty that at least one of them has it.

Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR)
For organizations that are serious about business continuity, an enterprise-level Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution is the best option to ensure the preservation of your mission-critical assets. BDR works by taking a backup of only files that have been changed since the last backup was taken, which allows it to take multiple backups throughout the workday instead of just one large backup after-hours. These backups are then stored in the cloud for future access.

BDR can also restore directly to a device, or to the BDR hardware itself, depending on just how bad the disaster is. This keeps downtime to a minimum and helps you get back in business as soon as possible following a disaster. If you have nothing to restore your data to, a backup device with all of your data can be sent to your office’s location overnight.

Are you ready to get started with BDR? To learn more, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.