Most of us don’t really think about our files. We just put them on our hard drive, or on DropBox, or we just leave them on our cameras, flash drives and other devices. But what happens to your business-critical information after a disaster? If your company is like a lot of other small companies, you may be in trouble…
According to the 2014 Disaster Preparedness Benchmark Survey, nearly 2/3 of businesses said that their disaster recovery planning and testing did not prove useful in their worst event. Almost 50% of businesses will suffer a data loss that keeps them closed for one or more days, and of these businesses 40% of them will go out of business within one year. The numbers are even worse for businesses that suffer a fire.
So, where is your business-critical data?
We specialize in working with clients to develop appropriate disaster recovery plans. As they say, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Prevention, in the case of all things IT-related, means having a layered and redundant approach to the problem.
The first layer is robust security. The number one cause of lost data is ransomware, which encrypt your data and demand a ransom for decryption. Having Enterprise-class hardware and antivirus solutions is a must in this day and age.
The second layer of is on-site replication. To have files that are instantly recoverable, you must have a centralized repository that collects the data and stores it in place. This is different from a server or other attached storage. The data must be physically isolated from the server so that it can’t be corrupted by viruses or environmental damage.
The third layer and fourth layers are off-site replication and Archiving. This is incredibly important. All the backup drives in the world won’t be able to save your business if they are all sitting in the same server room when a flood or fire hits. There are many off-site solutions for enterprise-grade data replication that are “high-availability”, meaning that the data can be recovered quickly and easily. Firms can also elect to archive their data either in physical vaults or with Amazon Glacier or similar services. Archived data is still important, but it is not actively being used.
How is your backup and disaster recovery plan? Use the Contact Us form to the right to get in touch.
