How Can I Cost-Effectively Back Up My Data And Provide For Disaster Recovery?

In the past, devastating ice and snowstorms kept businesses in and around Boston closed for days. This often resulted in lost revenue, work that piled up as high as snowdrifts, missed deadlines and unhappy customers. But, today with a Business Continuity Solution that includes a Backup & Disaster Recovery Plan (BDR) with the ability to store your data and IT assets securely in the Cloud, you can keep you and your staff working productively from anywhere you have internet access at an affordable price.

Why Is Data Backup and Disaster Recovery Planning Important?

Depending on the location and nature of your business, your operations may be vulnerable to any number of natural disasters such as wind and snow storms that down trees and power lines. Or, a simple accidental deletion of data by one of your employees can put your business in a precarious position. Plus, don’t forget about the continually increasing cyber attacks that hold business data for a ransom. For all these reasons and more, you need a Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan.

What’s Included In a Proper Data Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan?

A good Business Continuity Solution starts with a BDR— Successful backups are the backbone of business continuity.

A plan for the backup and restoration of your data is essential. For a proper BDR, your IT service company will evaluate your current backup and recovery procedures and provide you with a detailed report of their findings. The next step is to ensure that your data is backed up to a secure offsite data center every day and that your backups are tested to make sure they are always recoverable from a recent point in time.

Regular monitoring and testing of your backup documents gaps and errors and remediates them to prevent the possibility of failed backups that keep you from staying operational. It guarantees that you will always have access to your data.

Taking your backup one step further, your IT service company will show you how to leverage the full power of the Cloud so your staff can continue working from anywhere they can access the Internet.

What Does Data Backup and Disaster Recovery Mean?

Backup and Disaster Recovery identifies critical IT systems and networks with Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). These are two of the most important parameters of your BDR and will help you choose the right steps to take.

The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the amount of time it takes for your business processes to be restored after a disaster to avoid unacceptable consequences. The RTO answers this question: “How much time did it take to recover a business process that was disrupted.”

RPO measures your company’s loss tolerance or the amount of data that can be lost before significant harm to your business occurs. RPO is a time measurement from the loss event to the most recent preceding backup.

With the RPO/RTO, and a business impact analysis, you can identify what you need to include in your business continuity plan. Your plan should include the steps you must take to resume business operations to meet your RPO/RTO. The data backup plan should at least minimize any adverse effects on your business operations.

What Can Happen If I Don’t Have A Backup & Disaster Recovery Plan?

If you don’t have a BDR and you lose your critical data, and you may have to close your doors. Why? Because:

  • You’ll have to start over and re-enter all the data you lost. This takes time and costs money.
  • Without the data they need, your employees can’t complete their required tasks.
  • If you must comply with industry or government regulations and you can’t replicate your data for an audit, you could be penalized.
  • If you lose your clients’ data, you could be taken to court.

The National Cyber Security Alliance found that 60 percent of small companies go out of business within six months of a data loss.

How Can We Cost Effectively Back Up Our Data?

Backing up your data to an enterprise-based cloud backup is the cost-effective way to go.

In the future, more businesses are expected to use the Cloud to back up data. According to statistics, 78 percent of small businesses will back up their data on the Cloud by 2020.

For example, if you have 1,000 gigabytes of data to back up, you’ll probably pay about $4 per month for cloud storage. Pricing starts at around $0.004 per gigabyte per month for cloud storage.

If you chose instead to back up the data to an on-premise location, you’d pay about $50 for a hard disk with 1,000 gigabytes of storage space. Then you’ll want to purchase multiple disks for redundancy, so now this cost goes up to about $150. At this cost, it would take you nearly three years to recover this cost compared to the $4 a month.

Plus, if your office is damaged by flooding, fire, etc., your hard disks and stored data could be destroyed. Now you’re back to where you would have been if you didn’t back up your data.

All the more reason why an enterprise-based cloud backup is more cost effective.

In Conclusion

As you can see, the benefits of backing up to the Cloud are numerous.  Cloud backup costs are lower than using an on-premise backup infrastructure. And cloud data offers higher levels of availability and is easier to access than data stored onsite.

We can explain this in more detail. Contact Radius Executive IT Solutions in Stoneham, MA.

And visit our Blog for info about up-to-date IT solutions and news.

Latest Blog Posts

Read Tech Blog