From that presentation you were up all night working on to important tax information, it’s second nature for us to save copies of our personal data whether that be on a thumb drive or a service like Dropbox. Yet, drives fail, coffee spills, and humans make mistakes.
And the fact is, the risk of losing your presentation is a lot less than losing massive amounts of critical business data.
How can entire organizations keep their business up and running?
They need robust solutions to prevent the loss of critical data and to minimize the cost of downtime.
While each business has unique needs and requirements deserving of a custom solution, the bare minimum is to backup critical data offsite. Data backups are essentially taking a snapshot of your data and storing it offsite.
From protecting against disasters, both natural and otherwise, to keeping an archival of records, data backups play a vital role in keeping your business up and running.

Data Loss and Business Continuity

A business continuity plan is a set of protocols and procedures in place to prevent loss of critical data in the event of an unplanned incident and keep essential business functions running. A good business continuity plan will account for unplanned downtime resulting from natural disasters, network disruption, and human error.
While the cost of downtime ranges based on a broad spectrum of factors, this survey found that 98% of organizations reported a single hour of downtime would cost them over $100,000. This may include anything from replacing failed hardware and paying your staff overtime to fix the issue to the loss of sales and critical data.
The name of the game is, How fast can you get back up and running from unplanned downtime? The company which recovers fastest gains the competitive advantage.
In the event of a disaster like flooding or local power outages, an offsite replication of critical data will provide something for your systems to retrieve, preventing you from unnecessarily rebuilding your business. The latest backup prior to the malware attack can be retrieved and unpacked, to get your data back and your business running again.

Archival

While backups are most commonly discussed when building a business continuity plan, they also play a large role in storing key data for archival purposes. With backups, the data is not saved on top of itself but rather alongside the prior data.
In other words, with backups, you’re creating separate versions of your data and routinely assembling a chronological archive for your business.
This archival serves as a beneficial tool in the chance your organization undergoes a routine audit. Your team can simply sort through the history of backups and pull the relevant version of your data needed.
With offsite backups, you can have access to this comprehensive archival without the burden of storing the data on premise.
The second reason why archives are a great reason for your company to have backups is to safeguard against ransomware. With any virus or malware, once it’s infiltrated your systems the process of recovering data can be tricky at best and impossible without the right precautions in place.
With the archival provided by data backups, you can simply retrieve a version of your data before the ransomware took hold and restore your systems back to that point in time.

Build it right the first time.

While all this sounds a bit scary, it’s important to note that “build it right the first time” is a thing. Most providers want to assure you they are doing the best practices just like you do if you had the chance.
Yet, you’re often still left scrambling in the case of an emergency. Instead of doing double the work to either recover from downtime or panicking to find archives, consistently backup your data.
We’ve made it easy for you. Choose from prepackaged solutions with R1soft backups or turn our storage solution, GigeVAULT, into a data backup system that fits in any budget.