It’s a scary fact that 32% of companies that had a “major loss” of data were immediately put out of business, and another 38% permanently closed their doors within two years. Only 30% of businesses that had a major data loss were still in business within 24 months!
That is Scary!
The encouraging thing to this dreadful thought is that data loss is completely avoidable. What is frightening is how many companies believe they are fully protected only to find out they weren’t when catastrophe strikes. Some were not given the proper guidance, while others chose to ignore the risk.
Advanced Disaster Recovery plans are more than mere backups. ADR is a multi-layered defense against data loss.
- Image level backups are the first layer of protection. Software that makes an image of your servers and then adds any changes made hourly or more insures you can restore from a point in time close to the catastrophe.
- The second layer of protection is a BDR Server (Backup Disaster Recovery Server). This is a server that stores the images of the servers you are backing up. If you have a server go down, the BDR Server has the capability of taking the backup image and creating a virtual server that you can use while your main server is being repaired. You can continue to work without down time.
- The third layer of protection is replicating copies of your data off site. Fires, floods, tornadoes, lightning, theft, etc. are rare but they happen. The newest threat to your data is the crypto-locker virus (Ransomware). This encrypts your files rendering data useless. You want to make sure you have a copy of your images somewhere else in the event you need them.
- The fourth layer of protection is the most important. Testing your plan. There are many horror stories of companies that thought they were protected but when it came time to restore, they found out that their backups were not usable due to corruption or other issues. Testing your images is essential to any ADR plan.
It makes no difference if you are a small or large business. Data loss is going to happen. Staying prepared is the safeguard to keeping the Data Monster away!