What a company must remember in the event of a catastrophe is that more than just the physical location of the business will be lost. Customer information, sales data, and employee expertise are also at risk in the event of a disaster, and a smart business will have kept this in mind when assessing and planning for risks. They must have insurance, yes, to replace the building(s) and their physical inventory, but they should also have a plan as to how to recover their data as well.
Many companies back up their data in-house. The problem with this is the lack of distance between the host server and the backup server. If they’re together, they are vulnerable to the same catastrophes: if the backup server is in the basement next to the host server, for example, data won’t be lost in the event of a server crash, but it will be lost if the basement floods or a tornado tears the building down. If they’re not technically together, even being in the same metropolitan area can be dangerous – Hurricane Katrina destroyed an entire city.
Off-site backups, however, are expensive. This is why, in the past, it was only the larger companies that survived disaster situations intact – they could afford to maintain alternate locations in the event of natural disasters.
Today, however, there is another choice: cloud services. When data is in the cloud, it isn’t tied to a physical machine and therefore isn’t vulnerable to natural disasters. Because the data is available anywhere, a business can be run from anywhere.
Smart businesses have a backup plan before they need one. While no one wants to think that a catastrophe will happen to them, businesses that fail to plan for the possibility are planning to fail. There is no such thing as perfect planning, of course, because assessing risk for catastrophes is hardly straightforward. While some assumptions can be made – Kansas isn’t going to get any hurricanes, for example, so Kansas businesses can rule that out, etc. – things like terrorist attacks or plane crashes happen without rhyme or reason.
Contact us to learn your options for data backup.
