Having a disaster recovery action plan is one of the most important aspects to your accounting firm, or any industry that relies on critical data storage. It’s unfortunate that statistics consistently show some accountants ignore many of the potential disasters potentially befalling them. Some instances show it’s not always about natural disasters and can easily turn into being a victim of ransomware.
Whether it’s a natural or man-made disaster, your accounting firm could become extremely vulnerable when data becomes compromised. Because your clients depend on you to keep their information safe, your reputation and own financial future are on the line.
Relying on antiquated systems like tapes just isn’t going to help either when you need to extract data in a hurry. With downtime a major factor in getting yourself back on your feet, you need something restoring data within an hour at the least.
The cloud is the answer thanks to its universality and connectivity. You can access any data stored there immediately and wherever you find an Internet connection.
Let’s look closer at backing up your files, business continuity planning, and causes behind potential disasters.
Backing Up Your Accounting Files Regularly
As an accountant firm, you and your accountants are constantly entering data from your clients. Some of this data might get entered through a mobile device as more of your team works in the field.
When using a cloud-based platform to save your files, it’s important to have one backing up regularly so you don’t lose essential data from the same day a disaster hits. Some backup systems only back up every few hours or once a day, hence only saving what you’ve saved up to that point.
Since your clients need to trust you when giving you their financial information, they don’t want to hear you’ve lost some of their critical data because you didn’t prepare.
Putting Together a Business Continuity Plan
If you’ve never properly defined a business continuity plan, it’s a process where you document everything you need to do to keep your business running when a disaster occurs. Unfortunately, too many don’t bother to put together a BCP.
Some stats show 80% of all business that don’t have a BCP after a disaster end up going into liquidation 18 months later. This doesn’t include possible bankruptcy if you can’t access files within 10 days.
It’s imperative you plan out a way to maintain some form of continuity for your accounting firm, even if it’s on a basic level.
The cloud can virtually store the entire contents of your accounting files. Using the cloud alone already saves most of your business (excluding the building where you reside), plus having immediate accessibility.
What Kind of Disasters Could Happen to Your Files?
As noted above, ransom-ware has become a major problem for accountants and all industries. Natural disasters, though, continue to plague people nationwide in places where people sometimes least expect it.
Floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, and even freak acts of nature can happen everywhere now. If you rely on your own server to store all of your client files, it could become destroyed instantly from nature’s fury.
Man-made disasters are about as equal or almost exceeding disasters from nature. Ransomware is just the start of the cyber threats out there now, with hacking possibly occurring under your nose.
Without full monitoring of your files in a digital environment, you’re perhaps violating compliance laws due to hackers snooping into private financial data.
At CompuData, we’re proud to bring a reliable and secure cloud hosting platform for your accountant business, or any business. We’re here to remove all concerns you have about what disasters could befall you, and cloud security.
Contact us to find out more about our general IT management services that act as a guardian to all your files.