As a business owner, you’ve surely thought about what the future holds for your organization. However, one of the things that you need to think about that’s not often considered is the event of a data disaster. How can your business bounce back from such a catastrophic event? One of the first steps is understanding your data backup and disaster recovery process, as well as how you can improve your current setup.
Is your business still using tape as its primary method of data backup? If so, you could be missing out on a more reliable, less time-consuming alternative. Image-based, or “snapshot” backup solutions continue to be the optimal way to guarantee the continuity of your organization’s data infrastructure, and we’ll explain why.
Disasters are an unfortunate part of doing business in a technology-heavy workplace environment. You need to expect the worst, but it’s often difficult to predict what types of disasters your organization will have to endure. There are a few universal disasters that you’ll encounter, regardless of where in the world your business operates.
It’s every business owner’s worst nightmare: one mistake, and all of their data is wiped out. This very situation happened recently to a hosting provider, and his story serves as a cautionary tale in regard to data storage best practices.
For example, let’s say that your business is storing your data backups on the cloud. Normally, there are two ways that you can store these backups: traditional tape backup, which is generally prone to user error and requires a significant amount of physical space; and cloud backup. Usually, a data backup would take up a ton of space on your in-house network. Furthermore, backing up your network and storing this information on the network is a rather precarious situation. If something were to happen to your network’s data, your backups would also be eliminated, and then you’d be in a seemingly impossible situation. This is the primary reason why your business needs to store your data off-site in a secure data center, in the cloud, or both.
When you mention the term 'disaster recovery,' most people think about the big ground-shattering events like earthquakes, fires, floods, tropical storms, etc. While these natural events are certainly disasters and devastating in their own right, smaller things can constitute as a disaster for your business, and they aren't seasonal.