We warn you about this all the time. Stuff happens. And while you can’t really predict or control nature, you can control (at least partly) the effect it has on your small business. You don’t want to let a storm, an earthquake, fire or other disaster lead to the destruction of your company. It’s imperative you do what you can before disaster strikes to prevent any harm. One of the most at-risk concerns is your data. Is your data protected?
Larry Lang, the CEO of Quorum, which offers cloud-based disaster recovery systems, shares his insights about how SMBs can protect themselves.
Prevent downtime. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy the nation’s millions of small and mid-sized businesses are once again reminded of the need to quickly restore/recover data and servers following disasters. It literally can mean the difference between life and death for your small business. A recent report by Aberdeen found that downtime costs mid-sized businesses a whopping $74,000 per hour. Small to mid-sized businesses now, more than ever, need to implement disaster recovery solutions into the IT infrastructure of their companies to maintain business continuity.
Backup plan. Small business owners have to think outside the proverbial “box” when it comes to implementing these types of solutions. While tape or disk backups have traditionally been the business continuity method used by small and mid-sized businesses, these seem to be a thing of the past as hybrid cloud solutions have emerged as a less-expensive and less-complex fallback.
Recovery time. You should also be aware of how long it takes to recover your information and get your servers up and running. Businesses can’t afford to be offline for hours, days or potentially weeks waiting for your IT departments or consultants to figure out the problems. Hybrid cloud solutions offering instant recovery can help your businesses get back online and running within minutes.
Testing. It’s important for your business to test your system. You need to test often, and test within the current environment your systems are running in. With a constant influx of patches and updates, businesses that test their systems only once a year become obsolete when disaster strikes. In other words, testing on a regular basis is crucial to business continuity. Automatic and on-demand testing provides the extra reassurance that your data, applications and systems are safe in the event of any disaster.
