Backup and Disaster Recovery
"Invest in Backup and Disaster Recovery so your business stays running."
Experiencing unexpected downtime can have drastic consequences on an organization with no plans to mitigate it. Apart from reducing employees’ productivity and morale, it decreases customer satisfaction and gives your competitor an edge over you.
Understanding backup and disaster recovery and their importance to your organization can enable you to take the necessary steps today and safeguard your business.
What are Backup and Disaster Recovery
Contrary to popular opinion, backup and disaster recovery are uniquely different from each other, and one cannot exist without the other if you plan to build a foolproof organization.
Backup
Backup is the process of creating a copy or multiple copies of your data, which is then stored offsite or on the cloud. Backup serves to protect your data against accidental deletion, database or software upgrade error, or theft.
Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery involves the steps and tools an organization takes and employs to restore access and functionality to its IT infrastructure – applications, data, and other key resources – after an event, such as natural disaster, equipment failure, and cyber-attack. For example, an organization may ideally choose to switch to a remote secondary data location to continue operations until it restores functionality to its primary data site.
Backup is not the only element required for disaster recovery, as you may well notice after experiencing a major outage. It is essential your organization needs to have a disaster recovery team, identify critical business assets, and perform risk evaluation and series of testing and optimization.
Why backup and disaster recovery planning is important
The critical importance of backup and disaster recovery cannot be overemphasized, especially with the growing rise in nation-state cyber-attacks. Regardless of your business size, investing in backup and disaster recovery ensures your business stays running when you lose access to vital IT infrastructure, hence, preventing you from losing gains and customers.
Data are always at risk
There are multiple ways you can lose data and access to your IT resources, from natural disasters and hardware and software failure to data leaks, hacks, and virus infections. While you cannot completely safeguard your organization from some of these risks, you can at least minimize their impact on your business by having a proper backup and disaster recovery solution in place. That may involve user and employee training, two-factor authentication, anti-virus installation, and establishing firewalls.
The cost of unexpected downtime
Unexpected downtime can take a heavy toll on your organization if operations are not restored in time. Downtime means data loss, which in turn means your employees won’t be able to access critical business technology that keeps your organization running. That may include internal operations and customer servicing. Setting a low recovery time objective (RTO) is a must for every successful organization, which involves investing in a robust backup and disaster recovery solution.
Protect your organization’s reputation
When your organization takes longer than usual to reestablish operations, you start casting doubts in the mind of your customers. If this occurrence happens over and over again, your customers will start looking for other options as they have lost faith in your organization’s strength and credibility. That may even cause potential customers to avoid and choose your competitors over you.
Take action
Data and disaster recovery are essential to your organization’s longevity and success, especially if you’re operating in a highly competitive industry. Having a proper backup and disaster recovery solution in place not only prevents permanent data loss but also reduces downtime and minimizes its impact on your organization.