Directors Blog February 2012

Operations Director, Paul Anderson explains why Remote Backup is critical to Business Continuity.

Imagine a scenario where your systems fail through accident, interruption or physical disaster and you confidently get your backup tapes or disks out of the safe only to find they will take four days to restore.  Or worse still, that they are corrupt or damaged and you join the 93% of businesses that go to the wall within five years of suffering a big data loss.

Despite the many secure remote backup solutions on the market, too many organisations still put their faith in backing up vital data and operating systems to tape, disk or even another server. 

But the fact is that they are putting their business at unnecessary risk, and they won’t realise until it’s too late – you only find out your backup solution is a failure at the recovery point.

All organisations have a common need for local and offsite backup facilities that encompass all business applications and operating systems and have inbuilt disaster recovery capabilities.  And they want all of that at an affordable cost.

Offsite backup and restore services will soon form the vast majority of business continuity solutions, according to industry experts.   And it’s not surprising, considering the benefits:

• Backup Software & Application Agents are supplied at no extra cost & is effectively a free upgrade to the existing in-house solution
• All data is encrypted, backed up locally and stored via private or public cloud, in top security data centres
• Fast restore rates and instant access to backup data when it is needed
• De-duplication technology makes efficient use of the storage by storing multiple instances of the backup data
• End users have full access to backups, and can restore on a bulk or file by file basis if required
• No extensive tape and disk libraries to maintain, or manual processes to manage 
• Can use internet links or private WAN circuits depending on bandwidth requirement considering rate of change
• Unlimited amounts of data can be retained indefinitely with sufficient storage
• Disaster recovery can be built in to the solution

Opting for a managed service from a partner who is a specialist in secure backup, disaster recovery, hosting and storage solutions gives businesses access to a back office team of experts who can configure the backup process, carry out 24/7 monitoring and provide proactive alerts of possible problems, and quickly recover and restore data if necessary.

As budgets are squeezed and business owners want more for less, the right partner can make remote backup solutions affordable even for very small businesses.

The very worst time to think about your backup solution is when it’s just failed. 

So don’t wait - ask yourself just how well your critical data and systems are protected and how fast you could have the business back up and running in the face of disaster.