Prepare, Plan &, Test your Backup Strategy
Data backup means different things to different businesses but one thing is consistent no matter how large or small the business: you need an ironclad data backup plan. While everyone knows that they need a data backup plan, it often falls to the wayside to deal with more pressing matters. Unfortunately, it is often too late when the realization arrives that the there was no backup plan, or the backup plan was ineffective in meeting the organizations objectives or requirements.
Some of you may me saying to yourself “We do backups”, and you may, but when was the last time you checked to make sure the backup was successful? Have you tested one of those backups to ensure you would be able to restore your systems or data? If you are still using tapes, there is a strong likelihood that you will not. Without taking a proactive approach to data management the chances of losing valuable data increases exponentially. According to SCORE,
A Company that experiences a computer outage lasting more than 10 days will never fully recover financially. 50 percent will be out of business within five years. An estimated 25 percent of businesses do not reopen following a major disaster. 70 percent of small firms that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year.
Of companies experiencing catastrophic data loss:
- 43% of companies never reopened
- 51% of companies closed within 2 years
- 80% of companies that do not recover from a disaster within one month are likely to go out of business.
- 75% of companies without business continuity plans fail within three years of a disaster
- Companies that aren’t able to resume operations within ten days (of a disaster) are not likely to survive.
- Of those businesses that experience a disaster and have no emergency plan, 43 percent never reopen; of those that do reopen, only 29 percent are still operating two years later.
Those are some pretty startling numbers, but as access to line of business applications become more critical to the bottom line, minimizing downtime due to the data loss become increasingly more important. How much would downtime and data loss cost your business?
Data backup can take many forms and there are many products and strategies to meet just about every recovery objective. Offsite backup, SAN replication, server imaging, virtualization, and the list goes on. Additional considerations like business continuity and data retention also need to be accounted for. Navigating the labyrinth of products and services available can be a daunting task. You need a partner to help guide you to the best solution for your organization. While San Diego IT has partnered with industry leaders, we are first and foremost a services business, we don’t have product sales quotas so you can be confident that you are getting the best solution not just the next high margin widget.
San Diego IT has been providing disaster recover, business continuity and data backup solutions to San Diego businesses for over a decade. We’ve helped companies just like yours put together solutions that meet their data backup and recovery requirements. Whether it is a simple data restore of a spread sheet accidentally deleted or a server failure, San Diego IT disaster recovery engineers have the solution to get you back to business.
