Disasters, both natural and man-made, have unfortunately been headline events recently. While protection of human life is always the priority, attention turns to the effect of catastrophic events on businesses. No business owner likes to think about the “what ifs,” but the possibility always exists of system failures and/or destruction which could bring the company to its financial knees. Despite these concerns, many business owners don’t give disaster recovery the attention it needs, putting it on the back burner to address day-to-day issues.
With cloud computing, significant advances in backup and disaster recovery have been made, yet many businesses have not taken the time to upgrade or even test their current plans. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are particularly guilty of this as they lack many of the resources that large enterprises use. A recent survey of 1,000 SMB professionals revealed that 45 percent said they experienced a data loss which resulted in an average of $9,000 in recovery costs. Additionally, 42 percent of those who responded stated that they believed their disaster recovery plans had shortfalls, with only 30 percent believing that all of their data would be recoverable.
Though many businesses do recognize the need for improved backup and disaster recovery plans, they continue to utilize on-premise hardware that exposes them to both natural and man-made catastrophes. Additionally, they must be committed to a schedule of performing timely data backups, which can be a time-consuming and interruptive activity in itself.
With the popularity of affordable cloud backup services available, SMBs now have more options to safely store their data as well as have easy maintainable backup and recovery procedures in place. Here are some of the minimum requirements to address when considering backup solutions.
• The ability to recover data quickly and easily from any loss or outage.
• Protection from data theft or corruption.
• The ability to restore an entire server in a timely manner without a several days-long outage.
• Continuous backups on a regular basis so that critical data backups are always current.
Cloud computing easily meets these requirements. A significant benefit of cloud computing is the ability to have faster server recovery from an offsite data center. These servers can be easily replicated between data centers. To save resources, a business can also choose to save only the most critical applications which can be readily restored in the event of a failure.
Columbus Data is a leading provider of telecom and IT solutions for small to medium businesses. Contact us for information on how we can provide your company with affordable but state-of-the art technology services.