When you are working to bullet-proof your business, one of the first things you need to address is ensuring that you have all your data backed up. Your data is the lifeblood of your business – regardless of what industry you are in and you need a disaster recovery plan.
Back-up your business lifeblood to avert disaster
The threats to your data are multiple:
- Some sort of destruction at your premises – fire, flood, cyclone, water leaks etc.
- Hardware failure – onsite servers.
- Inadvertent deleting of critical data by an employer.
- Malicious deleting of critical data by a disenfranchised employer.
- Hacking or ransomware attack.
2020 statistics from Datto showed that downtime costs start at around $10K an hour for a small business while only 2% of businesses recover from a disaster of any time within an hour.
The sums around an efficient back-up process quickly become clear. When data is lost it’s usually irretrievable, so it’s understandable why some businesses never recover.
As a minimum a business needs:
- Automatic back up system. For system critical information, data should be backed up in real-time vs. timed intervals such as daily
- An off-site back-up
- Version control of back-ups. At a minimum, three revisions of each document.
- EVERYTHING backed up – including old legacy systems.
What to do:
- Create automatic workflows to ensure there are back-ups both onsite and off-site.
- Get advice as to whether file or image level back-ups are right for your business.
- Leverage cloud storage so that files can be access over the internet, minimising downtime. However, data loss can occur in the cloud, don’t make that your only solution.
- Consider using a file repository like NAS (Network Attached Storage).
- Don’t forget files in subscription software such as Office 365 – emails in Outlook, spreadsheets in Excel etc are not stored inside your network, they’re on a Microsoft server – which sounds pretty secure – but it’s your responsibility to back up this data too.
