Businesses these days practically need to expect disaster, as even the most careful and calculated security practices could result in a data disaster. Some businesses don’t fear for their data enough, and this leads them to neglect planning for threats such as hackers, natural disasters, and user error. As the business owner, you need to stay informed about how best to handle these situations.
Sometimes it can be difficult to truly determine the damage that can be done by a disaster, but it’s more difficult to prepare for something that you can’t necessarily predict or foresee. How can you know that your data will even be lost from a disaster? Well, you can’t; the point is that you need to be prepared, even for unseen problems or unexpected downtime. We’ll discuss some of the most likely culprits of data loss, and what you can do to protect your business from them.
Natural Disasters
Have you considered your business’s vulnerability to disasters like floods, fires, tornadoes, earthquakes, or electrical storms? These can all affect, or even destroy, your business’s data infrastructure. In fact, many of these have been known to destroy even physical infrastructure. Without data backup, your business could lose not just its office, but also the data that’s needed to keep your business running. In particular, hardware failures can be predicted and avoided to dodge costly downtime.
User Error
Nobody is perfect, and even the most model employee will make mistakes. The problem, however, isn’t understanding this, but knowing that these errors can cause trouble for your business. They might accidentally hand over important credentials to someone masquerading as IT support, or store a file where it’s not supposed to go. User error is often a problem that leads to data loss.
Security Breaches
Hackers generally break into systems to do one of two things: 1) Cause trouble, or 2) Steal data. You’ll find that data breaches will almost always lead to either some damage being done to critical files, or the complete and total theft of your data. It’s important that you’re ready for both.
So, how can you keep data loss to a minimum? A backup and disaster recovery solution is your best bet, as it can provide these three critical preventative measures that can improve data retention and maximize uptime.
Regular Backups
One of the key components of any quality data backup system is the ability to take regular backups. In the past, tape could only perform backups at the end of the day or after-hours. With a cloud-based data backup system, you can perform backups as often as every 15 minutes. This means that your backups will always be up to date, guaranteeing minimum data loss from a disaster.
Quick Recovery
Data backups are helpful, but only if they can be deployed quickly and efficiently. With tape, a data restoration could take several hours or even days, whereas a BDR solution can have your data infrastructure restored much more quickly. In fact, a BDR can temporarily take the place of your server in the event of downtime.
Off-Site/Cloud-Based Storage
Many businesses tend to store their data backups in-house on their corporate network, but this is a bad move. If your data backups are stored in the same location as your other data, they’re subject to the same risks. This is why it’s a best practice to store your backups off-site or in the cloud (why not both?).
Exact IT Consulting’s comprehensive suite of proactive and innovative technology solutions can help you make strategic, long-term IT decisions.
