Small businesses put a lot of effort into building their companies. Over the years, you’ve cultivated relationships with customers and vendors, built innovative new products and solutions, and collected vast amounts of data.
What would you do if it all of a sudden vanished—poof—into thin air?
The Dangers of Data Loss
It doesn’t take much to cause data loss.
While it’s sensational to cite cybersecurity as the biggest reason to back up your data, the fact of the matter is that there is so much more that can go wrong with your data infrastructure that could lead to data loss. For example, you might experience a hardware failure or a system malfunction that wipes out databases, financial records, or project files. Even user error and accidental file deletion can bring about data loss.
Data loss also directly impacts your bottom line, as that data can no longer be put to work for your organization, and you have to spend even more time recovering it.
Backup Strategies That Work
Backup technology has come a long way; for example, you no longer have to keep tape backups in your office, taking up physical space.
While there are many options for data backup that work, we recommend one in particular: an automated solution that pushes copies of your data to multiple locations so you always know there’s a copy of your data within arm’s reach. This automated solution, called BDR, takes snapshots of your business’ data periodically throughout the day, then pushes those snapshots to your backup locations. Since only data that has changed since the last backup is pushed at any given time, this system prevents a large backup from tying up your network resources while also ensuring that your data is as up-to-date as possible at any given time.
Of course, having copies of your data is only half the battle; it’s what you do with those copies that makes a difference.
The Disaster Recovery Plan
Once you’ve ironed out your backup strategy, it’s time to move on to the rest of your disaster recovery plan.
A good disaster recovery plan will detail the steps your business takes to restore following a data loss incident with minimal downtime, as well as the key personnel involved throughout the process. This means identifying recovery time objectives (RTO), how long it takes you to recover to an acceptable level of operations, and recovery point objectives (RPO), how much data you need at an absolute minimum to keep operations moving in the right direction. Furthermore, you should be testing this disaster recovery plan regularly to ensure that it goes off without a hitch.
After all, the last thing you want is to actually need to use your disaster recovery plan, only to find that it hasn’t been working for the past six months.
Get Started with Backup and Disaster Recovery Today
While we certainly hope you never have to use your disaster recovery plan, we want to ensure you have all the tools to survive a data loss incident of any scope and scale. Business Solutions & Software Group can help you implement the strategies and tools to aid your efforts. Learn more by calling us today at (954) 575-3992.
Comments