When it comes to your business nothing else matters but being able to provide your products or services to your clients. When I talk to business owners the one key factor that keeps coming up is what happens if your network crashes, your internet goes down or some malicious ransom-ware like Crypto-locker infects your system. Those items are more likely to happen than a natural disaster (flooding, tornado, hurricane, etc.) Most of these companies have backups of their data that’s stored either on their servers or old clunky LTO tapes on site.
Let’s go through a scenario, its 10am on a Wednesday and everything is working fine, your company has a major deal in the works and then the fear hits. Your network has just shut-down for reasons unknown. Everything you had worked on was on the network and now it’s inaccessible. You call your IT Company or IT person to get this resolved as soon as possible. They go through the typical steps to try and mitigate the problem. The IT guys tell you that they need to restore the data and need to get the tapes out of storage. Now, you wait. Could be minutes, could be hours or even days to get the data restored depending on the type and size of data that was lost. This is one of the main reasons Why Tape storage is a dying technology!
In today’s IT world more and more backup admins and IT companies are now pushing their companies to a BDR solution.
But why?
A Backup and Disaster Recovery solution is a game changing aspect for companies in the sense of business continuity. A BDR solution has varying levels of abilities and service. In a simple description, you are able to backup all of your data as you did before with an in-house server. That server can in turn replicate to the cloud, allowing your business to operate from anywhere with an internet connection.
The next problem when I have offered this suggestion to business owners is, WOW that sounds great!
But, it also sounds expensive.
They are right, to get a system like this you will pay a little more on the front end. But when each client takes into account the cost of an outage that include things like salaries, potential deals, potential products sales, services lost, resources lost and recreating all of the lost data, they understand the value of a complete backup and disaster recovery solution.
If you aren’t backing up your data, it could end your business when you experience an outage. With any backup technology whether its tapes, another server, or a Backup and Disaster Recovery solution you are purchasing insurance for your data.