Tag Archives: #NaturalDisaster

How a BDR (Backup Disaster Recovery) Plan Works for You

Data Backup, , ,
Cyber security and data network protection concept showing a business owner using her laptop computer for checking her business' data protection and security back-up plans.

Cyber security and network protection is critical for any business

What happens when your tech stack is put at risk? Businesses everywhere are now built on their technological assets. Servers, data, work software, and customer data are all essential before you even begin with websites, apps, and online security. This creates an incredible infrastructure of data. Data that must be protected and data that is relied on. So what do you do when something goes terribly wrong?

Many disasters can befall a company’s servers, network, or tech stack. But what do you do when data is lost or at risk? That is what a BDR plan helps you to deal with. But it can be difficult to visualize where a BDR would be useful unless you can grasp the disasters themselves. Today, we are highlighting three common disasters and how BDR can help you fully recover your business in the face of these disasters.

1) When You’ve Been Hacked

Hacking is the number one threat to modern business data and infrastructure. More than natural disasters, more than chance data corruption, even more than employee mistakes. Hackers are everywhere, there are more every year, and they share tactics to target modern businesses. There are many types of hack, the most notorious being the Ransomware attack. Ransomware and other malware is designed to invade a computer or a network then wreak havoc.

Once you become aware that there is a hack, it becomes necessary to root out every scrap of malicious code and program in your network.  This can be a near-impossible hunt for barbs left behind by poisonous programs – unless you have a BDR plan saved for your system.

With a complete backup and a recovery plan to implement it, you don’t have to search out every last bit of malware. You can nuke-and-pave your entire network to eliminate the malware without any loss at all. After resetting your hardware, a backup allows you to fully restore your system, your data, and even your specific installations and configurations for a fully malware-free system. This is the ultimate way thumb your nose at hackers, denying them both disruption and harvested data all at once.

2) Damaged by a Natural Disaster

Natural disasters are even less avoidable than getting hacked.  Sometimes, a large storm or event hits your region and there is very little that any local business can do to prevent the kind of damage that can happen. Basements flood. Buildings collapse. Fires can burn through server banks. Natural disasters can desolate a business’s hardware and, in turn much of their technological infrastructure. With damaged servers, data can be lost. With damaged offices, an entire network and workflow infrastructure can be taken out.

How does backup disaster recovery help you? The answer is that BDR can also be used to rebuild your business from the ground up. Replacing one computer or every physical device in an all-new office, a cloud-stored backup with a recovery plan means that you can fully restore your tech-stack on any working hardware. If your insurance covers an all-new office and devices, your BDR can then upload your entire digital infrastructure back into place.

This is the true spirit of business continuity.

3) Corrupted Software Updates and Lost Data

Finally, there is corrupted and lost data, the original reason why BDR plans were designed for modern businesses. Software can corrupt when updated – destroying the tech stack and all related data – or even just a section. This is a common enough problem that regular backups are the known solution. At the same time, common employee errors can occasionally cause massive data loss. Mis-clicks or tapping the ‘delete’ button at just the wrong time can cause seemingly irrevocable data loss and other damage. Fortunately, a good backup can restore some or all of your data so that no single temporary mistake becomes catastrophic to the company or even to the employee.

 

How does BDR help your business? Backup disaster recovery plans can save you from malware, data corruption, mistakes, and natural disasters With these heavy-hitters at the top of the list, no doubt any business can think of a dozen more smaller disasters that a good backup and a comprehensive recovery plan can do to ensure business continuity. Contact us today to consult on the best BDR plan for your company.

4 Complete Data Disasters where Backups Can Save Your Business

Data Backup, , ,
technology, data, backups, IT, information technology

Cybersecurity crisis, natural disasters, accidents – backups can protect your data from all of these.

When you set up the backup recovery system for your company network, it’s hard to imagine what you could possibly need it for. Sure, sometimes an employee accidentally deletes an important file and maybe one of your servers crashes at an inconvenient time. But when will you ever need to recover your entire network all at once; every server, every endpoint device? Well today, we have the answer.

A comprehensive backup recovery system is essential because there are real-world situations where your entire office or every computer in your network might be irrevocably damaged. These are data disasters that you never see coming, but they happen statistically often enough that no business should gamble their entire digital existence on it. Let’s take a deeper look at four of the surprisingly common situations where a complete backup recovery system is exactly what you need. Just in case you need to start over from scratch on wiped computers or entirely new hardware.

1) Ransomware

Ransomware is one of the most notorious types of malware out there, a combination of a direct hacker attack and a virus that attacks your entire business network. If ransomware accesses even one of your endpoint computers or devices, it can infect, encrypt, and essentially destroy every file on your entire business network. And because you can’t trust hackers to fulfill their word or even know how to decrypt your files, best possible answer is to wipe every affected device to factory settings and restore. But if you have a comprehensive backup recovery plan in place, recovering from a devastating ransomware attack can take less than a day of wiping and recovery.

2) Natural Disaster – Earthquake, Tornado, or Flood

Natural disasters happen from time to time. Hurricanes ravage coastlines, and tornadoes ravage areas too dry for hurricanes. Cities on fault lines are always at a certain amount of risk and, every now and then, the sky opens up and rains for weeks on end. It’s never a good idea to gamble against nature. If some incredible act of nature knocks out your office building or floods up to the second floor, that doesn’t have to be the end. With cloud-stored complete backups of your system and settings, you can install on new hardware with barely an interruption to your business or the services offered to clients.

3) Office Fire

Even more common than natural disasters is the common building fire. A fire doesn’t even need to devastate an entire office building to destroy every computer in your office or on your floor. They can be started from faulty wiring, a dirty break room stove, or a space heater left on and forgotten over the weekend. When you have a comprehensive backup ready to go, even an office fire that consumes your local servers and all your in-office workstations can be recovered from.

4) Corrupted Software Update

Lastly, and unfortunately the most common of all, is what happens when you update a piece of software and something corrupts along the way. Depending on the software update process, this can potentially ravage your entire data system or large swaths. Databases can be wiped out. Your entire tech stack can be corrupted by one failed upgrade that propagates itself throughout the network.

While you could try to meticulously roll back the failed update and correct every piece of data it damaged, it is often faster simply to wipe the affected programs and databases and restore from your most recent backup. Which won’t be a problem as long as you have a managed backup recovery system ready to go for exactly this kind of data disaster.

The key to surviving anything from targeted hacker attacks to powerful natural disasters is cloud backups. When your backups are remotely stored and protected, you will be able to not only restore and recovery whenever needed. You’ll be able to restore and recover in a whole new place, a new office, and even if every scrap of your old installation is destroyed. Contact us today for more backup recovery insights!