If You Don’t Have a BDR Plan Today, You Might Not Have a Business Tomorrow.

June 13th, 2017 by admin

You have an insurance plan for your house, your car and your health. But what kind of insurance plan do you have to protect all the data your business relies on? Backups are the best proactive measure that your company can take to protect your data. But there is one thing more important than backups that most people forget about…testing them. There is an overwhelming amount of data flowing through the veins of every business. Every department, functional area, employee, vendor, and client produces more and more vital data by the day. It is historical information, current work-in-progress, and upcoming priorities and plans. There are accounting reports, transaction details, calendars, to-do lists, as well as vendor and customer details. Our businesses live and die by emails, spreadsheets, databases, and specialty apps for each industry. We have reams of correspondence, memos, meeting agendas and minutes. We need to protect the HR details for each employee. Just like cashflow, these massive sets of data are part of the lifeblood of your business, and protecting them is essential for your clients and employees.  What would you do if you woke up one morning and that data was gone?   Disasters happen – both large and small – that’s why we help clients make and test Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) plans. With ransomware and cyber-attacks on the rise every year, the need for a strong BDR plan becomes more and more vital. Whether data loss or corruption is caused by a cyber-attack, a flood in the server room, a “critical update” gone horribly awry, drive failure, or just a wrong click of a button by a power user, your business needs to get back on its feet ASAP.

The One Thing MORE Important than Backups

Backups make everyone feel good, but they are only the first step. A backup can be simple or complex, but basically it is a copy of your core data or machines. In theory, these can be restored if there is ever a data loss disaster caused by computer viruses, human error, hardware failures, fire, flood, theft, cybercrimes, etc. Disaster Recovery Plans are where the rubber meets the road. Disaster recovery is returning to a normal state of operations after a data loss incident. It is ensuring that your backups are actually recoverable. The strength or weakness of your disaster recovery plan can determine the speed and fullness to which you can restore your data. If your BDR plan is weak it can take days to get proper licenses, install operating systems, setup software, configure the settings and environment, then restore and test all the data.

Industry Statistics:

The following statistics show just how ahead you will be if you have a reliable BDR plan.
  • According to a survey carried out by Mozy, on average, 60% of SMB’s do not budget for any form of backup. 15% of SMB’s use remote, automatic online backups. Surprisingly, 10% of professionals email themselves copies of documents as a backup strategy.
  • InfraScale statistics shows that it takes 18.5 hours on average for a business to recover from a disaster.
  • According to a business audit conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers and DTI, 70 percent of small businesses that suffer a significant data loss are out of business within a year of that event.
  • 54 percent of companies report they have experienced downtime from a single event, lasting more than 8 hours, according to Invenio IT. (Remember that 8 hours = 1 full working day)
  • Another survey performed by GFI Tech Talk determined that 32% of IT Admins do not test backup solutions for effectiveness.

Equinox IT Statistics:

  • When it comes to backup and disaster recovery, time is money. The faster you can get up and running, the more money you are saving. We can help almost every client fully recover (every server they own) in under 4 hours.
  • We monitor and remediate over 63 terabytes of backup data 24/7 for our clients to ensure that their backups are working properly.
  • As we’ve stated before, the one thing more important than backing up your data is ensuring that it is recoverable. It’s not enough to backup your data and assume that the recovery process will work. It NEEDS to be tested. We regularly audit and test backups for recoverability and backup selection.
  • Creating a BDR plan doesn’t need to be difficult or expensive. In fact, we’ve narrowed it down to three easy steps in our blog post here. If you are looking for an easy way to ensure peace of mind about your backup and disaster recovery situation, set up an appointment today. We’ve got your back…and your backups.

Posted in: Protection, Security, Tech Tips

Categories

Archives