Redundancy – Casserly Consulting

Do You Have a Data Backup In Place?

Take a moment to imagine the absolute worst disaster scenario for your business. Does it involve a catastrophic event destroying your office building? Does it include key staff being absent from the office for extended periods of time? Does it include your business suffering from data loss or security breaches?

Most businesses that fail to recover their data following a data loss scenario go out of business within a year of the incident. Furthermore, there are a lot of small businesses out there that don’t necessarily see the value in a proper data backup system. Most just assume that they will be able to survive a loss incident, or they feel that a data loss incident won’t happen to them. This is not the right mindset to have for a business owner–especially not one that has the future of their business at heart.

Instead, you need to imagine the worst-case scenario and ask if your business continuity plan includes a data backup solution to minimize damage and downtime. Here are three ways that a cloud-based Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution can help your business survive even the worst data loss incidents.

Multiple Backups Daily
Traditionally, businesses have relied on tape backup for most of their backup needs. Due to the increased strain on your network, tape backups need to be performed during off-hours, and only once a day. The problem with this is that you could potentially lose up to an entire day’s worth of data and progress. Cloud-based BDR takes multiple backups as often as every fifteen minutes, which allows for higher redundancy.

Cloud-Based Storage
There’s something to be said about the cloud and its ability to make data backup storage far easier. Thanks to the cloud, a BDR device can take and store multiple backups in secure, off-site locations for later access. After all, you can’t store your backups in the same location as the rest of your data. What if you were to experience a major disaster, like a flood or ransomware infection, which leads to the destruction of your in-house data infrastructure? When this time comes, you’ll be glad you’re storing data in the cloud and away from the site of the incident.

Reduced Downtime
When your business can quickly restore data in a moment’s notice, the amount of downtime suffered drastically falls. This helps your business stay active even under the worst circumstances. BDR can instantaneously restore your data to the network-attached device, allowing your organization to quickly get back in action following a downtime incident. The BDR device can even act as a temporary server while you make more permanent arrangements.

How does your business protect itself from data loss? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to reach out to us at PHONENUMBER if your business needs help with its technology.

Prepping For A Weather Event Needs To Happen In Your Business

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:

Establish the plan’s reach
Identify your key business areas
Establish which business functions are critical
Outline which business areas and functions are interdependent
Establish a limit to how much downtime each function can experience
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.