You never know who or what is going to f*** up. You can't expect human error to not occur, or that mother nature wont throw the worst at you. and you can almost certainly guarantee that technology will fail you in some way at some point. Though you can mitigate that risk by having a solid Disaster Recovery plan in place, along with good redundant backups of everything.
Natural Disasters
Up here in Queensland, the weather can be extremely unpredictable. We've had some very wild storms over the last decade that have resulted in some extreme flooding, resulting in billions of dollar in damages. This is just one extreme of the wrath of mother nature. Without the proper preparation, getting back on your feet after a fire, flood or storm can be near impossible. It's imperative that you have the necessary redundancies in place now, so that if the worst comes, you're prepared and ready to roll out. In fact, according to an AXA 2007 report, over 80% of the companies that close for more than 5 days after a natural disaster don’t open again, so it’s important to have a plan in place to keep your company running in the event of a natural disaster.
Human Error
We all make mistakes, some less than others. No amount of caution or preparation can completely prevent human error, but it can help to reduce the impacts. Forgetting an important step or entering wrong data can have disastrous consequences for your business which are not always easy to detect. Ensuring that you have a backup policy in place, at the correct schedule, that are themselves then backed up, and offsite, is the only way to ensure that you don't lose that important data. With the correct backups, you can automatically check and double check your data to ensure it's continuity. Storing it in the cloud and/or co-location for redundancy.
Cybercrime
Cybercrime is on the rise, with almost 47% of businesses falling victim to ransomware, you need to be prepared. There are some wild statistics that will make your skin crawl. The only solution is to try and guard your data as best as possible, with backups and redundant firewalls, anti-virus and anti-spyware which would put an additional wall in case of a security breach. Additionally, a disaster recovery plan should include systematic steps to recover from a hacking attempt, with instructions on what to do in case of a virus or ransomware attack, which could bring the organisation to a halt for days on end.
Hardware Failure
Although modern IT hardware isn’t very likely to fail, no device is completely immune to failure. A power surge could crash entire systems, or network connections could fail leading to loss of critical data. Since it’s not always possible to reliably predict how the failure can occur, it can prove costly to eliminate every possible point of failure in your IT hardware.
Mechanical hard drives are the most prone to failure, some more than others. So it's important to keep your hard drives in good health by monitoring their status continuously. All hard drives have a limited lifespan, and depending on how they are used, the types of drives that are used, their environment and how hard they work, this could be dramatically shortened. The most effective solution to protect against such failures is to backup data regularly.
Your service delivery
Customers have come to expect better services for less, and they are known to be less forgiving in case of mistakes. In the case of data loss, regardless of the reasons why, your customers are more than likely to leave you for another business. Retaining customers requires effort. Acquiring new ones needs even more. But re-acquiring an old customer after you lose their trust in an IT disaster can prove next to impossible. It takes much less effort, time and resources to come up with a disaster recovery plan.
A disaster recovery plan, and regular cloud-based backups are essential to keeping an organisation running and ensure its longevity. No hardware or software, however modern, is invulnerable to disaster, and while prevention techniques themselves are crucial, it is much more important to have a recovery plan in place in case disaster strikes. Protect yourself today with a backup and disaster recovery process to ensure that you maintain your business continuity no matter what happens.
Now is the perfect time to start leveraging the cloud and to start planning a future with a focus on embracing efficient, effective cloud strategies. You wont regret it, and your clients will appreciate it.
A backup that isn't tested often can cause problems down the line if you find out you're unable to restore from it because of a corruption in transit.
Your backup solutions form part of your disaster recovery plan. The better your strategy, the less time it will take to get back up and running in case of emergency. 33Technologies offers a Disaster Recovery & Backup Plan tailored to your business and its operational requirements. Contact us today for a free audit of your current backup and disaster recovery processes, and find out what you can do to ensure your business stays alive in case of emergency.
