By John D. Browning
Years ago many late evening news casts opened with the line "It's 10 PM, do you know where your children are?" That was a sobering question for many parents if their children were not already home for the evening. If you are a business owner, do you worry about your valuable business data when you go to bed at night? Do you know that the life blood of your company is safe and available to you?
Being sure that your company's data is backed up is important, but that is only the first step. Even though it is backed up, is it readily available and easily accessible. In the past, data backups were the big thing. Now days, disaster recovery and business continuity plans are what most businesses need to be looking at. Disasters can come in many forms. Storms, fires and floods are what many of us usually think of when the word disaster is used. This is true, but unfortunately many businesses are facing disasters caused by virus, malware, encryption exploits and other forms of cyber-attacks.
Having a good backup with a local copy and some type of off-site copy has always been important, but now most businesses need a plan that includes not only recovering lost data, but making it available to the users so that business can continue as normal. There are many options available. The important question to ask yourself is how quickly you need to get everything back to normal when a disaster happens. If you can operate for a few days without your computer system functioning as normal, you probably need a basic data backup. If getting your business back to normal as quickly as possible is your main focus, you need to look at one of the more sophisticated disaster recovery / business continuity plans. In today's environment, we have systems that can allow you to restore your server or other computers within a few hours. There are even systems that will allow you to continue working as normal from the cloud while your local system is being rebuilt or reloaded.
As you might expect, the more features a plan has and the shortest possible amount of down-time, the greater the investment. There is not a one size fits all plan that is right for every situation. We sit down with each client, discuss their needs and present them with an appropriate plan. If you are worried about your valuable data and what would happen if it became inaccessible, give us a call and request a free consultation. We want your data to be available to you when you need it. Don't let 10 o'clock get here without knowing that your data is safe.