Published September 24, 2021 | Categories: IT Services
It’s Hurricane Season.
Unless you’re a Carolina hockey fan, those words are enough to send a shiver down your spine, especially given how frequent—if not constant—hurricanes and storm warnings have become in recent years.
Beyond the very real threat hurricanes pose to people’s well-being and property, they also pose another challenge to small business owners. A natural disaster may not only severely damage your business’s facilities or stock, it can also destroy the data you rely on every day to get your work done. If a storm, for example, floods your office and wipes out the hard drives where you keep all of your customer and financial data, bouncing back after a disaster is going to be a serious challenge.
That’s why it’s so essential to have both data backup and a recovery plan.
Backing up your data is one of the most important things you can do to protect yourself and your business. You know that, though. The question is, how are you backing up your data, and how often?
You’ll want to be sure that your data is secure and stored somewhere offsite so that if your business facility is physically destroyed, your data remains safe. The cloud offers some of the best offsite data storage solutions, offering the scale and flexibility you need to keep ALL of your important information backed up and easily accessible.
The other key question is how often you are backing up your data. Many cloud storage services allow daily backups, if not more frequent. When did you last check how often you’re updating your data? If it’s too long between backups, you could stand to lose days’ or even weeks’ worth of information in case of disaster, and that simply isn’t worth the risk.
Of course, securely and frequently backing up your data is only half of the process. You also need a plan in place to recover your data.
To do that, you’ll need to determine key data recovery parameters: the optimum recovery point objective (RPO) and the recovery time objective (RTO).
The RPO determines how old your recovered data can be: in other words, how far back do you need to go get everything you need to get back to doing business. The RTO, on the other hand, defines how quickly you need to get back online. How long can you go with your network down? Can you function at all with no or limited data, or would that be a complete hindrance?
Answering these questions is essential to building an effective disaster recovery plan. Your answers may vary, but you’ll likely want to get back online and back to doing business as soon as possible. Fortunately, protecting and recovering your data and your business can be easy with Beacon IT Services (BITS).
BITS is a long-time partner of cyber security experts Datto. Together, we provide the software, hardware, planning, and execution required to keep your data safe, especially in the face of natural disasters. Utilizing Datto’s data protection solutions specially designed for small businesses, BITS is able to implement disaster protection and recovery plans that’ll get you back on your feet in no time.
One of our key services? Instant virtualization to support recovery, which significantly reduces downtime and restores your system instantly with the push of a button.
That’s just one of the many ways BITS can help protect you from disaster. Contact us today to begin developing your comprehensive data backup and recovery plan. There’s no getting around hurricane season, but you can reduce the threat it poses to your business.
