Don’t Let Disaster Strike, Start Backing Up Your Data Online

Disaster recovery and business continuity are IT buzzwords that simply mean “having an in-case-of-emergency plan”. Traditionally, these plans included duplicate servers, located out-of-office, that required hours of maintenance, monitoring, and of course copying and encrypting sensitive company data for storage.

The benefits of online backup for small businesses ensure that you won’t fall victim to tragic environmental disaster or corruption that results in the destruction of all your company data. Virtual disaster recovery ensures that no matter what happens to your primary data storage location, you have multiple copies spread out in the cloud.

Online backups are a reliable way to guarantee that your business can quickly and easily recover from destruction, corruption, or malicious threats — things that could potentially stall business operations for weeks, months, or more.

Original Disaster Recovery Methods

Backing up and storing data in a secondary (and sometimes tertiary) data center was quite common for enterprise businesses. However, small businesses couldn’t handle the large expense of maintaining multiple data centers located in numerous locations to protect their business-critical information.

The need for another option quickly arose out of this, and the answer came with cloud computing.

Storing backups in virtual data centers ensures that copies of your files and data are always secure, and readily available should disaster strike. These online backups eliminate the need for a secondary data center, and potentially the need for a primary data center due to secure packaging, constant communication, and complete reliability.

Online Backups Reduce Costs

Operating a data center is no small cost. There’s the cost of the physical space + the cost of the hardware + the energy costs + the physical manpower costs. Eliminating these costs could account for approximately 70% in your IT spend.

Online backups act as off-site storage facilities that are managed by a third party, typically your cloud provider. Saving you the hassle of hiring and managing the staff to oversee the safety and security of your data.

Additionally, as website traffic and your storage needs ebb and flow, your storage needs are also completely scalable. Paying for what you use at a time, instead of how much hardware you were required to invest in as your needs grew.

Forever Archiving Keeps Your Business Compliant:

Many industries, whether it’s law, healthcare, retail, or the financial sector, regulations require that you store transactional information for a number of years. Even if this compliance rate is 7 years, that’s a lot of data to keep in archives, available in case of complaint or any other need to retrieve it.

Cloud hosting providers such as Microsoft Azure offer up to 99 years of online backup data retention to ensure that you remain completely compliant.

The confidentiality of this archived information is also important to maintaining your business integrity, and falls under the umbrella of a number of consumer-related laws. Breaches to information by hackers can target businesses to access credit card information or addresses of your clients and customers. Online backups ensure that your data is encrypted, both in transfer and at rest, to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.

Avoid Personal Horror Stories:

Small to medium-sized businesses require their operations to be up and running at all times. From law firms requiring access to proprietary applications, to the client files in a healthcare facility, you simply cannot continue business without access. Due to this intensive reliance on technology, unprepared businesses that did not prevent against data loss suffer immensely.

According to the Unitrends, 93% of companies that suffer irreversible data loss will go out of business within 1 year. Without IT reliability, almost all companies who lose access to, or experience complete data center failure went out of business.

The Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council stated that in 2014 36% of organizations lost one or more critical applications, with 19% losing most or all of their data center.

Of those companies reporting losses due to data loss or failure, 20% reported losses between $50,000 to over $5 million.

Even if it’s loss to one application, or your website going down for a few hours, data loss, corruption, or failure can damage your reputation and cast a shadow on your brand.

How to Backup Your Data Online:

Cloud online backup software provides real-time protection with seamlessly integrated storage functionalities. Small to medium-sized businesses can rest assured that their proprietary data is stored securely in the cloud, without the hassle of creating duplicates and backups stored in costly physical data centers.

Increase your IT team's productivity by minimizing worry about storage and encryption, and get them focusing on the big picture: your core business goals.

In most cases Backup package ensures complete planning, prevention, and protection from data breaches and corruption, while orchestrating the encryption and secure archiving of data in multiple locations around the world.

Multi-year backups ensure that your business remains compliant with storage regulations, and are easily accessible at any time.

You can never know when your hard drive is going to crash, and you can’t predict if human error is going to result in that key business file being accidentally deleted. But online backups can ensure that you have consistent access to your key files, business-critical data, and archived documents to ensure that your business can continue unhindered.

Choose the right disaster recovery vendor to get your business files backed up in the cloud and to discuss a comprehensive virtual disaster recovery plan for your organization.