Hurricane Katia Is On the Way: Is Your Business Ready?

It's official! We're in the heart of hurricane season, and as Hurricane Katia makes her way across the Atlantic, and as individuals and businesses pick up the pieces from damage caused by Hurricane Irene, I thought it important to discuss why a data backup strategy is an important piece of your disaster recovery plan. As many along the north eastern coast learned last weekend, hurricanes are quite unpredictable by nature and you really just never know what threat a storm may pose so it's best to stay prepared.

As we discussed a two weeks ago at Cracking the Code: Business Technology, safeguarding your business from a data disaster should not be considered optional for any business owner. In fact, the safety of company data is a very important aspect of risk management for your company and is equally important as auto or liability insurance. If your business experiences a flood, a fire, or a hurricane and you lose important company data, there is no insurance policy that will save you. At that moment having your data will be all that matters.

Given this reality, I wish to drive home the point by sharing a few chilling statistics regarding data loss. Chew on these numbers for a moment:

• 49% of small businesses in the United States have experienced data loss
• 93% of businesses that experience critical data loss for 10 days or more, file for bankruptcy within a year
• 140,000 hard drives crash every year in the US. That equates to 4 hard drives every 15 minutes. Could yours be next?
• The number one reason for data loss is a lost or stolen laptop

Despite the fact that both the cost of storage and data backup solutions have come down considerably in cost, suprisingly small business owners cite cost as the number one reason for not having a data backup solution in place. Personally, I think there is a strong misconception that data backup is expensive. Not only is data backup inexpensive, but it can also be quite easy to setup and configure. So how do you safeguard yourself? Let's make it really simple.

Ideally, you should have 3 copies of your data. The original, an onsite backup, and an offsite backup. Additionally, your backup solution should be automatic and require as little ongoing management and manual involvement as possible. Setting it and forgetting is the name of the game, however you should make sure the software you have notifies you in the event that a backup fails.

‍Onsite Backup

‍Your onsite backup solution will vary depending on whether you have a central server in your place of business where all your data is stored or if your data resides on decentralized laptops and workstations. In the case of a central server you should probably utilize an external hard drive to back your data up. Even though your server may be equipped with a tape backup, we generally advise against using tapes. Tapes not only require the manual intervention to change them, restoring data from tapes can be prone to error. Having an onsite backup has the advantage of being much quicker to restore from in the event that an important file goes deleted or if you need to recover your data in its entirety.

‍Offsite Backup

‍In addition to your onsite backup, we strongly advise an offsite (or cloud) backup. Why? In the event you get hit with a physical disaster, an onsite backup could be destroyed along with your original. An offsite backup is also the recommend option for scenarios where your company data is decentralized on different workstations and laptops.

There are numerous online backup services that provide secure and continuous methods for storing a copy of your data offsite. We have personally worked with quite a few, and a quick Google search will reveal some of the main players in the industry such as Backblaze, Mozy Pro, Carbonite and others.

‍Other Considerations

‍If you have a large amount of data, it may not be feasible to upload all this data within a reasonable timeframe to your offsite provider. To minimize the chance that you experience a data disaster prior to all your data being uploaded, you may wish to 'seed' your data backup. Seeding simply means sending a copy of your data directly to the online data backup provider to be the initial set against which future backups are done. Make sure to check if your desired online backup provider offers this option.

My advice, take data backup seriously, put a solution in place and use it. You never know when a disaster may strike, so make sure your data backup is not an afterthought. If you need help selecting and implementing a data backup strategy, please feel free to give us a call.