Have you ever wondered what it would take to knock your company out of business for good? It might surprise you if we said that, in theory, it doesn’t take much at all–perhaps a thunderstorm or a hacking attack to cause irreparable damage to your data infrastructure. Is your company prepared to handle any and all data loss incidents? With a business continuity plan and data backup, you’ll have as great a shot as ever to bounce back following a major disaster or data loss incident.
Most notably, a business continuity plan includes much more than just data backup and recovery. While these are certainly important, a business continuity plan includes other critical aspects of running a business, including keeping your staff and personnel safe, as well as having a communications infrastructure and a place to do business in. If you’re not taking these measures into account, you could be exposing your business in such a way that a very random event could knock you out of existence.
While all of the above aspects of business continuity are important, we’re going to focus on data backup and disaster recovery, or BDR. With BDR, you can ensure that your business can survive even the worst threats. Here are some of the major considerations you’ll need to think about regarding your data backup situation.
How Much Data are You Backing Up?
There is no such thing as having too much data backed up. You should be backing up all of your data, or as much as you possibly can. This is so that you never have to guess whether or not important information has been backed up. Even losing a small amount of data, like a couple of contacts, can be a major annoyance, as you will have to waste countless hours replacing the data that has been lost.
Tape backup might take complete backups of all your data, but it can only do so in a limited capacity due to how resource-intensive this process can be. A cloud-based BDR system can take backups much more frequently, and as a result, you’ll experience minimal data loss in the event of an incident. BDR only takes backups of files that have changed since the last backup was taken.
How Often are Backups Taken?
If your data isn’t taken often enough, you might encounter issues where data is lost due to the backups not being up to date. For example, a tape backup system only takes one backup, and it’s at the end of the day. Since the process is long and resource-intensive, it needs to happen after hours so that operations aren’t disturbed. Unfortunately, this leads to a situation where you could lose out on a lot of data and productivity, either due to an unforeseen loss incident or taking backups too often and causing downtime in the process.
Cloud-based BDR offers a great opportunity to help your business take advantage of much more frequent backups, all without sacrificing any uptime. Backups will only update files that have been altered, so more backups can be taken periodically throughout the workday–as often as every fifteen minutes. This helps you keep data loss to a minimum.
How Quickly Can You Restore Data?
You can’t waste any time when data loss is a problem. To minimize the damage done to your business, you’ll need to restore your resources and assets as quickly as possible. However, if you don’t have an office (or the technology to get back to work), this can be a problem. Tape backup can leave you without data for hours on end following a data loss incident, as it takes a considerable amount of time to restore. Your business can’t spare this time, and cloud-based BDR is the solution to this dilemma.
With Aspire’s BDR, you’ll be able to restore your data directly to the BDR device rather than a spare server unit (assuming you have one in the first place). This keeps you focused on operations without having to worry about replacing your hardware immediately. You can minimize downtime and keep your business in proper working order, even when the world is stacked against you.
Do you want to ensure your business can survive even the most poorly-timed data loss incident? Aspire can help you implement a data backup and disaster recovery solution that preserves your business’ data incrementally and efficiently. To learn more, reach out to us at (469) 7-ASPIRE.
