Your data is the lifeline of your business. All businesses need to be protected from data loss and downtime – whether it’s as a result of human error, hardware failure, software corruption, natural disasters or ransomware.
According to StorageCraft, 65% of companies do not have a backup or disaster recovery plan. And only 15% have an IT infrastructure that enables them to recover from a severe data loss within an hour.
All businesses should have some form of contingency plan, to ensure they do not lose precious data and suffer long periods of downtime.
Backup or Disaster Recovery
Having backups in place is not the same as disaster recovery. Disasters to your business can take many forms. An example: someone in your sales team leaves their laptop on a train, with important files saved locally (and not on the Cloud).
Having a disaster recovery solution enables you to restore quickly and efficiently when needed. And while ensuring that you take regular backups of all your systems is essential, it is of little use if you are unable to restore from these backups. That’s the difference between a backup and disaster recovery solution.
The Cloud and Disaster Recovery
Best practice is that you should backup locally, so you can easily restore should you need to. But you should also have offsite backups – so if something goes wrong with your local backups, or you can’t access them because of a flood or fire, you need to ensure that you have a backup elsewhere. And that’s where the Cloud comes in.
Your offsite backups can be in the Cloud – whether its data centre space owned by you, your service provider, your disaster recovery provider or a public Cloud provider. With basic Cloud backup, you will likely have to contact your service provider or Cloud provider to restore data, and you may have to wait days (or weeks) to get your data back. With more sophisticated Cloud backups, you could load backups in a matter of minutes.
Choosing the Right Cloud for Disaster Recovery
When choosing the right Cloud for your business, consider the following:
Do you work in a regulated industry? You will need to ensure and demonstrate that your business can operate in all scenarios, and that you have the right solution in place to ensure that downtime is reduced to a strict minimum.
How much data can you afford to lose following a disaster? Your Cloud offering should allow you to tailor your service levels and recovery options. If you have critically important data, you need to be sure you can virtualise in the cloud easily and quickly. But for some data, restoring via a hard drive may be enough.
How quickly do you need to be back up and running following a disaster? If you need to be up and running quickly, make sure this can be done easily with your backup systems.
Where is the data stored? You may need to ensure that data is stored within a specified geographic region. Make sure that the data centre meets the minimum data centre requirements necessary for your business.
Cloud Backups for Your Data
Your data is the lifeline of your business. And having a robust, tested disaster recovery plan is an absolute must for companies of all sizes. Regular backups are the foundation stone of your disaster recovery plan.
Not sure if your business has the necessary backup and disaster recovery solutions in place? Get in touch with ACUTEC today.
