Are You Protected? Data Disaster Recovery for Small and Medium Businesses
Dear Data-Diligent Reader,
And Now Data Backup and Recovery Is the Law!
Businesses of all sizes have become increasingly dependent on data. There is an increasing awareness that responsible business protection and risk management also includes moving data to a safe offsite location. In addition, increasingly more stringent regulations like the HITECH Act which signficantly puts teeth into the original HIPAA Security Rule make non-compliance with basic data backup and recovery a legal requirement/risk.
Certainly there are large-scale disasters such as hurricanes and tornados. But you need to protect your business from equally damaging events such as fire, flood, theft, a malfunction in the sprinkler system or simple human error which occur far more frequently. Now online data backup and recovery is one practical, affordable disaster recovery solution that is gaining significant traction within the SMB market. Here’s why.
Business information increasingly exists on server hard drives. To adequately plan to protect that data, it is critical for businesses to look not only at the value of the data on those systems, but also at the time required to get that data back after a failure and the tolerance for data loss after an event.
STEP 1 – Prioritization of Business Processes
The first step in planning a data protection strategy involves taking a critical look at the business and how it functions. How long would your organization continue to operate without its computing infrastructure, key applications or its data?
Inevitably, your computer systems will fail. Determining the business value that data represents to your company is essential in order to plan recovery of that business data when failure occurs. Fortunately, the value of data tends to align with function.
STEP 2 – Determine Business Objectives
Once you have established the relative priority of business applications, it is possible to determine objectives for recovery. There are three primary concepts that need to be considered when planning a recovery strategy: Recovery Time Objective (RTO), Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and the scope of the Data Loss Events (DLE).
Setting RTO and RPO goals requires the organization to look inward and make some clear, rational determinations as to how critical each business application is to the running of the company. Many businesses find that all data is not created equal.
STEP 3 – Data Loss Scenarios
Data loss events come in various shapes, sizes and scopes. IT plays an important part in every disaster recovery plan, but by no means the only part. This is especially true when the disaster rises to the level of a site-wide or regional disaster where the entire business facility is inaccessible. In these situations, the data processing aspects of the business need to be addressed in the larger context of business recovery.
The scope of a data loss event affects not only the way a company responds, but also how much a company invests in protecting against the event.
STEP 4 – Identifying Recovery Objectives
At this point, the business has determined the needs of business functions, prioritized business applications, identified data loss events and begun to define RTO and RPO goals. Now is the time to put all these concepts together and identify recovery objectives (RTO and RPO) for each class of application relative to the scope of the data loss event.
IT professionals and their business colleagues must keep several key points in mind:
- Correlation of objective to risk
- Corporate and Executive buy-in
- Representing business value
- Budget
- Reality check with other recovery plans
ONLINE DATA BACKUP AND RECOVERY ADDRESSES SMB DISASTER RECOVERY REQUIREMENTS
Online backup and recovery, the process of automatically moving data over the network to offsite storage, is a solution that has gained tremendous market acceptance within small and medium businesses, because of its ability exceptionally affordable price points.
The advantages of online backup are many, but can be simplified as such:
Fast RTOs
- Instant offsite data protection
- Assured data recovery
- Remove burden of data protection
- Professional management
- Recovery from anywhere
- End-to-end encryption
- Cost effectiveness
CONCLUSION
Without foolproof data protection in place, every business is at great risk from the mundane damage caused by human error or a virus as well as the devastating damage of a flood, fire or total system failure.
Thankfully, online backup has gained rapid acceptance and delivering levels of service that were, until recently, only available to the large enterprise.
To learn more about our online Server and PC backup solutions, powered by Iron Mountain Digital, please contact us or visit http://www.DataMountain.com.
We would love to hear your thoughts. Please comment below!
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