Backup disaster recovery is more necessary than ever as cyber threats become more prevalent and insidious. This doesn’t mean it’s strictly limited to natural disasters since human beings can cause just as many problems. Nevertheless, the combined threats permeating cyberspace are at red alert level now.

For your business, not having some form of backup in today’s times becomes the worst type of risk. Entrepreneur recently reminded that 40 to 60 percent of all small businesses don’t survive disasters. All of this comes from lack of evaluation on what makes a business vulnerable.

It’s easy to get complacent if nothing ever happened to your business in the past. What didn’t happen maybe five or ten years ago could easily happen now, especially newer threats you’re not aware exist.

So what are some common threats that could threaten your business data? With proper backup tools, none of these have to make you worry.

The Current Threat of Ransomware

This could soon become the worst cyber threat in the world. We’ve written about it before in our blogs, but we’ve seen an increase in ransomware since the first of the year. It’s been cited recently as one of the worst-case-scenarios in business disasters.

What makes this threat so bad is it’s so easy to catch if your employees inadvertently click a link in an email. Those behind ransomware frequently create convincing emails that appear to come from government agencies or superiors in a company.

Once the ransomware gets into your system, a hacker can shut down your entire network and demand a ransom to get your files back.

While some companies get their data returned after paying a ransom, not all do. It’s better to create reliable backup systems to prepare for this growing problem. With proper IT management, you can succeed, especially through the cloud.

Natural Disasters

Just about anything can happen in the way of natural disasters, and it goes far beyond hurricanes or earthquakes. Now freak winter storms or even floods can happen in places you wouldn’t expect. Your own business location may have typically calm weather, then suddenly experience something on a biblical level.

These events could wipe out your business in an instant. Having an on-site server could mean your entire business data disappearing forever. Even some other forms of backup may not have complete reliability, especially using something outdated like tapes.

Once again, with more reliable backup services from quality IT management, you can retrieve your files the same day without having to wait for hours. Through the cloud, you can access everything anywhere you find an Internet connection.

Human Error or Deliberate Disasters

While nature can always wreak havoc on a business, so can human beings. Sometimes a disaster may occur strictly because an employee accidentally deletes important data. Despite all the technological advances out there, it’s still far too easy to press one button wrong that eliminates entire databases.

Other times, employees can do things out of spite due to dissatisfaction in their jobs. When this happens, it can bring even more damage and cost you a fortune in downtime.

Small businesses experiencing downtime could have costs up to $427 per minute, so it’s time to prepare for any occurrence. Because you may have employees numbering in the hundreds, it only takes one of them to create a major problem accidentally or intentionally.

Through superior BDR systems, this kind of disaster won’t leave you hanging. What’s important is finding an IT provider that’s reliable and affordable.

Let us provide the reliable backup disaster recovery system you need here at SystemsNet.

Contact us to find out more about our comprehensive IT services.

A backup disaster recovery plan is crucial to the survival of a business. The odds of a business surviving a major disaster without a plan are pretty low, and it’s impossible to know when a disaster will strike. It’s the unpredictability that makes disasters the most dangerous. If something terrible happened tomorrow, would you be ready? If not, you better get started. Here are some important things to consider as you create your backup disaster recovery plan.

Data recovery

One of the primary focuses of your backup disaster recovery plan should pertain to how you will recover your data. Where is your data right now? How will it be restored to your system and whose job will it be? Does that person know how to do that? Do they need practice? This is also a really good time to take a look at how you backup your data. Having a plan to recover data is pointless if the backup data doesn’t exist. Make sure that your backups are current, and saved in several reasonable places. At least one copy should be off-site in case of a natural disaster. Make sure that you do have easy access to the data as well.

Communication

The quality and efficiency of the communication during a disaster has a huge effect on how everything turns out. It’s important to make sure that your disaster recovery plan includes specifics about how communication should happen during a disaster. Will a chain of command be formed? Will certain people have certain jobs? What happens if a part of the plan goes wrong? The key to a strong plan is to think of everything, or at least as much as possible.

Education and practice

A disaster recovery plan is completely useless if nobody knows what to do. Make sure to educate your employees about the details of the plan. Each employee should, at the very least, know exactly what they are responsible for. This will look different for every company. A great way to make sure that everyone knows what’s going on is a series of seminars or classes, but memos might work better for some. Just do whatever works best for your staff.

Once everybody knows what they’re doing, do a couple of practice rounds. Run through different parts of the plan. This will be a good chance to catch any mistakes and find out if someone isn’t quite sure what to do. Believe it or not, the practice rounds are almost as important as the training sessions.

Testing

You can consider the practice rounds to be tests also if you’d like, but it’s important that you have a chance to evaluate the recovery plan. There will probably be holes here and there. Do you have too many people doing that, but not enough doing this? Maybe there’s a task that needs a certain skill set that isn’t available in the staff that have been assigned to it. Using the results of the test runs, tweak your plan to make it exactly what your company needs.

Continuity

The goal of all of this is to maintain continuity as much as possible. Of course, immediately after the disaster, you’ll probably have to close, but you want to open again as soon as possible. There are several reasons for this, but the main reason is that you need to be able to take care of the customers that are depending on you. A lack of continuity is the fastest way to lose customers.

Have more questions about your backup disaster recovery plan? Contact us. We’re happy to answer all of your questions and help you with anything that you need.