What’s best for your business?
We backup our company and personal data because, these days, we simply must. The potential loss of the primary versions of data, and the systems or applications that create and manage that data is a real cause of stress for any business.
The causes of data loss are many, ranging from accidental deletion or change, catastrophic hardware failure, natural disasters, theft, or more increasingly, file corruption from an external attack such as ransomware.
When this happens, it’s not just the data that needs restoring, it’s the full work environment. This is in effect, Disaster Recovery.
The importance of a disaster recovery solution is very commonly overlooked and seen as a luxury, or an unnecessary expense for the business, without taking into account the potential financial loss involved. There are some shocking statistics surrounding this which are all readily available online.
- 40% of Small/Medium businesses close after a disaster.
- Only 25% of Small/Medium businesses that close following a disaster, ever reopen.
- 75% of Small/Medium businesses don’t have a DR solution in place.
- 52% of Small/Medium businesses say it would take at least 3 months to recover from a disaster.
- Only 18% of companies surveyed with fewer than 50 employees have a DR plan.
Backup and Disaster Recovery are not one and the same thing. Disaster Recovery can only occur when a good backup is in place.
Backup is simply a copy of a file or item made in case the original is lost or damaged.
Cloud Backup
There are various cloud backup options, but the basic solution is simply a cloud replacement for the local device backup, taking away the worry involved in having to physically replace a USB drive or a backup tape each day. All that’s required is a good internet connection. You can then monitor the daily backups remotely, or have a report emailed to you.
The downsides of this solution are
- dependency on an internet connection
- slow restore time when dealing with large amounts of data.
It will, again, generally be a data backup, as opposed to a full system backup. In the event of a hardware failure, due to fire, theft or otherwise, there would be no way of restoring from the last good backup.
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