For a growing number of businesses, data is the single most important resource. Be it a customer database, a parts spreadsheet, email marketing list or a growing collection of company documentation. Most businesses recognise their importance and keep backups, but even today, they tend to be ad hoc, not necessarily secure or off-site. So, if the worst happens, be it data theft or ransom, server or hard drive failure or loss of the offices, a business can find itself scrambling up a disaster recovery mountain.
Managed disaster recovery is a service that any company with IT requires. At its simplest, figure out how much money your company would lose without IT and data for one day. Then look at the low-cost of a disaster recovery solution. Without one, the chances of survival for a company are less than 10%. It starts with a plan, that we can help you create, listing all the information the company needs to continue operations. Then the hardware and applications it requires to work. Now think if all of a sudden, you couldn’t access those PCs or that data due to malware or worse. Larger companies should also run through a business impact analysis, risk assessments and create a management strategy to protect themselves.
When disaster strikes
In most cases, businesses are likely to be hit by relatively simple data loss. Then, the managed disaster recovery solution can have you back up and running within an hour or two, losing only the staff’s most recent work, a pain but not a disaster. Compare that to losing your staff productivity for days or more, as they scramble to recover backups from various sources.
The disaster recovery plan also creates a set of rules and guidelines on how to get people back up and running, if something worse occurs. If access to the premises was denied by fire or flood, they could work from home, borrow office space from a friendly company, or the business could move to one of the increasingly popular shared working spaces.
For immediate IT resources, they could use their personal computers or loan machines from a local supplier. Finally, they need to be able to access the data and applications, which with most cloud solutions, such as Office 365, is simply down to logging in on the new machine.
For any business, even a few hours downtime could cost them tens of thousands in lost revenue. With most companies increasingly reliant on data and computers, being out of action or unable to recover can seriously damage their prospects. Which is why a managed disaster recovery solution is essential for all companies.
Get in touch to find out how we can help protect your business data, and ensure you can continue if the worst happens with your own disaster recovery planning.