A Regular Feature to Help Your Business Improve Its Profitability
The Unidentified Risks in Your Disaster Recovery Solution
Is Business Continuity a Part of Your Plan?
Businesses today have become brutally aware of the need for backup and disaster recovery solutions to protect their data … but is a backup solution enough to protect your business?
The thought of losing data due to a disaster of any kind is daunting for business owners and IT Managers. Loss of data could mean lost emails, accounting data, patient or client files, company records, client legal records, orders, clients, or revenue, and so on.
Data loss is a real concern:
- 25% of PCs will fail this year (Gartner Group Study)
- 24% of companies say they have experienced a full data disaster (Forrester Research Study)
- 70% of small businesses that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year (Pricewaterhousecooper)
- The older your equipment the higher the risk
- 80 percent of businesses suffering a major disaster go out of business in three years, while 40 percent of businesses that experience a critical IT failure go out of business within one year. In the case of suffering a fire, 44 percent of enterprises fail to reopen and 33 percent of these failed to survive beyond three years. (www.usfst.com "Hidden Threats to Enterprise")
The right backup solution will provide peace of mind ... BUT only against data loss NOT from Downtime.
Recovering and restoring an organization’s data from a backup device (tape or drive) can require days or weeks when the primary environment suffers an unplanned outage or disruption. It involves repairing existing servers or spinning up new servers, re-installing operating systems and applications, etc.
Over the past few years, technology advancements in backup and disaster recovery have come a long way. Tape and disk backup used to be the best option for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) to back up their data. Today, there are far superior backup and disaster recovery and business continuity solutions than the traditional technologies of yesterday and they’re available at affordable prices.
Backup Solutions vs. Business Continuity Solutions
It’s important to differentiate between backup solutions and business continuity solutions. Simple backup solutions are capable of protecting against data loss, but not against downtime. After a disaster, there is no plan of action for getting data back in a timely fashion. This may not be a problem if backing up non-essential documents. Problems will arise, however, when access to an Exchange server or customer database is impossible due to an outage, power failure, or worse. When a business experiences downtime it loses productivity, its ability to communicate, access to customers, and most importantly, revenue.
Business continuity takes backup and data recovery to the next level. The goal of business continuity is to ensure that, in the event of a disaster, data is recoverable instantly, not slowly over time like with tape, local, and online storage options. In addition, the right business continuity solution will allow a business to function during a disaster, rather than simply recover from it.
When considering any backup solution it is important to assess two key metrics. The first is RPO, or Recovery Point Objective. RPO represents how frequently backups can be taken, or moreover how much data one is willing to lose. For example, if a business is utilizing a backup solution with an RPO of one hour, then a backup can be taken once an hour. With that solution, the business is stating that it is comfortable sacrificing up to an hour of data in the event of an outage. Traditional backup solutions can provide decent RPOs; however, a good business continuity solution can achieve an excellent RPO, of up to five minutes.
Where business continuity truly differentiates itself is with Recovery Time Objective, or RTO. RTO represents how long it will take to get data back after a disaster. This is an essential figure to know, because even though data is backed up and secured from loss, a business cannot function properly until the data is recovered. Business continuity solutions can provide RTOs of fewer than ten seconds. This is far superior to the weeks it can take to download large files from cloud online services, or the hours that it takes to convert server images for virtualization.
Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) are in the perfect data storm.
- More data is being created faster than ever
- The value and reliance on this data is increasing
- Businesses are at a greater risk of losing their data
To schedule a complimentary business continuity assessment, please click here.
About The LLB Group, LLC
The LLB Group, LLC is a leading Sage 100 ERP Partner (formally MAS 90 & 200), Computer Network Support and Telecommunications firm serving the Greater Philadelphia area since 1984. To learn more, call us at 267.464.1946 or visit www.LLBGroup.com.