Why Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Is Essential For A Small Business
A small business interior design company was using an inexpensive laptop computer without battery backup or data backup. The accounts receivable was about $50,000, listed on an excel spreadsheet. A pipe broke in the office building and flooded their office. The data on the laptop became inaccessible. The company sent the hard drive to a data recovery specialist and paid $2,500 to recover the data. They were lucky, because the data was able to be recovered. What if the laptop had been left in a car and stolen?
Scenarios like this happen all too frequently. They can be devastating, especially to a small business. As businesses have become more dependent on technology, it’s the business data that is of the greatest value. Protecting that valuable data is essential. No one can predict when disaster will strike. But if you are budgeting for the year ahead, it may be a smart move to talk to a technology service provider about a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery planning outlines how a business will continue its operations after disaster strikes. A disaster recovery policy puts in place procedures to protect critical data and the technology infrastructure of a company. These plans enable a business to continue running after disaster strikes.
IT disaster recovery services cover many types of destruction, including:
- Damages caused by floods, fires and hurricanes
- Catastrophic hardware or application failures
- Ransomware attacks
Prolonged downtime can be deadly, especially for a small business
In the example of the interior design company, downtime resulted in a billing delay. But disasters like ransomware or floods and fires could completely halt all business processes, resulting in 100% downtime. Recovery could take weeks. That’s why data loss and downtime has been statistically linked to small business failure.
Consider the financial impact of business-side downtime when a disaster strikes:
- All internal business processes cease: billing, ordering, customer service
- Sales teams have no access to customer data
- Employee productivity is lost
- Customers are dissatisfied
- Delays may result in missed deadlines, contract penalties and employee overtime
- Restoring your business IT infrastructure will be costly
If you do not have a formal emergency response plan and do not back up your data, when disaster strikes, the data loss and downtime incurred may well doom a small business. That’s why having a network backup solution with a robust disaster recovery plan to protect your business infrastructure is a critical. For small business owners, it can mean staying in business following a disaster.
Cloud-based disaster recovery
Cloud-based disaster recovery technologies are not just for large corporations anymore. The same technology used by Fortune 500 companies is available to small business owners.
Business continuity and disaster recovery key services
Here are some key services that can help your company ensure business continuity in the event of a fire, flood or ransomware attack in your office:
- VMware Virtualizaton Services– Applications, servers and networks can easily be backed up to the cloud in the form of image files.
- Acronis VmProtect- Acronis enables you to backup server images to local or remote storage.
- Amazon Storage Gateway – This technology is amazing because it allows your storage to be seen locally by your servers but replicate to the Amazon Cloud data centers. Add it all together and you can essentially flip a switch and run your servers from the cloud in the event of a disaster.
- Datto’s data backup technologies – get protection for your Office 365, OneDrive, Microsoft SharePoint, Google Apps and Salesforce data. In the event of a Ransomware attack, Datto’s data backup systems and network backup appliances can quickly restore corrupted or lost data. Automated backups can be scheduled up to three times a day, with additional backup customization possible.
Affordable plans, designed for small to mid-size companies
Nettology has been providing IT support and consulting services for small and medium-sized businesses since 2007. We offer affordable plans with predictable costs, and provide a range of managed services from Office 365 migration services, to cyber security risk assessments, to IT network support, design and maintenance. For more information on how Nettology stands apart from other companies offering information technology services, click here or call 610-558-1730.
