- US businesses lose $12 billion annually due to data loss.
- 93% of companies that lose their data center for 10 or more days file for bankruptcy within 12 months.
Did you know that many businesses disregard making disaster recover protocols a priority? Unfortunately, some businesses simply fail to grasp how time consuming the recovery process can be and the associated cost of downtime following a disaster – natural or otherwise. The good news is that today’s data protection technologies and services have greatly improved the IT piece of the business continuity puzzle. While disaster recovery planning for a large manufacturing facility will obviously be very different than fora small investment firm, there is a wide array of options available today at different price points – enabling enables businesses of all sizes to select a product or service tailored to their specific business needs.
What is business continuity?
Business continuity describes a complete solution for backup and disaster recovery. A business continuity strategy will protect data on-premises in physical and virtual servers and in the cloud. Whether data is on servers or in SaaS applications, it needs to be backed up. Business continuity goes a step further and offers you the ability to restore your data, which is termed disaster recovery. Whether a business is faced with a natural disaster, or a cyber-attack, strong business continuity practices will have you up and running in minutes, particularly business continuity solutions that leverage the hybrid cloud – guaranteeing a quicker restore time.
Why? Local backups are great to keep data stored on local devices, but if something happens to that device, then what?
A hybrid cloud backup solution takes an initial backup on a local device, and then replicates the backup to a cloud server. Cloud-only solutions are not as reliable on their own due to bandwidth issues. A hybrid model works to alleviate the vulnerabilities by implementing both processes to fill in the gaps. That’s intelligent business continuity.
Keep in mind, communication during and following any business disruption presents a variety of challenges.
Crafting an employee safety and communication plan that works is essential. The specifics will vary widely from company to company, but your emergency safety and communication plan should address how your company will ensure employees are safe during a disaster event and how your business will communicate critical information to employees following any event. If your employees do not have access to essential applications and data, there will be a direct impact on productivity and revenue – the opposite of ensuring business continuity.
Disaster recovery and business continuity planning should be considered a critical aspect of running a business. CompuData Managed IT Services can provide the data protection expertise to make sure your business is always in operation. Contact our Managed IT Services team today to get started!