Time To ReThink Backup
Imagine if life had a rewind button. Make a mistake? Just hit rewind and everything is back to normal. While the chances of any of us experiencing such thing outside of Hollywood movies is ZERO, the ability to use the rewind button in our digital life is already here. By that, we like you to think beyond the-very-useful delete and backspace keys on your keyboard and imagine recovering your lost data within a minute after a hard drive failure.
Losing data is more common than most people think. According to World Backup Day site, there are plenty of reasons to back up your data, but not nearly enough people do:
- 60 Million computers will fail this year
- 29 percent of disasters are caused by an accident
- 1 in 10 computers are infected with viruses each month
- 30 percent of people have never backed up their data
- 70 percent of businesses don’t have a disaster recovery plan
- Every week 140,000 hard drives crash in the United States.
- Simple drive recovery can cost upwards of $7,500 and success is not guaranteed.
The negative impacts of data loss for businesses is not comparable to personal data losses for obvious reasons. Yet, there are businesses that can easily justify spending thousands of dollars every year to insure their physical assets but downplay the risks of information loss and its terrible consequences. Such losses, according to Datto, can cost a business anywhere from $1000 to $17,000 per MINUTE.
Are all backup solutions the same?
We come across many businesses that rely on a tape backup and believe that the tape is all they need to back up their data. Unfortunately, the reality with most tape backups is that they are not dependable. Many companies realize this fact after a test shutdown and realize the need to rethink backup.
There’s a myriad of options available in the market today: off-site, on-premise, cloud, or hybrid… The volume (in GBs or TBs) in addition to the vitality of the data dictate the size and frequency of backups, but that’s not all.
What else is there?!
In today’s world of business, companies’ reliance on data to run their day-to-day operation is not disputable. Regardless of industry, organizations of all sizes need access to their data to manage vital business functions such as accounting, customer service, and operations. Downtime (planned or unplanned) affects not only the people who need information to perform their jobs but also every stakeholder in the mix, including customers. While a planned downtime is normally scheduled in a way that the negative impact is minimized as much as possible, an unplanned downtime can occur at any time and cause damages beyond repair.
There are two main objectives that every business owner need to have in mind before selecting a data backup solution: Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective.
The recovery point objective (RPO) is the age of files that must be recovered from backup storage for normal operations to resume if a computer or network goes down as a result of a system failure. The RPO is expressed backward in time (that is, into the past) from the instant at which the failure occurs, and can be specified in seconds, minutes, hours, or days.
The recovery time objective (RTO), on the other hand, is the duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster (or disruption) in order to avoid unacceptable consequences.
Having a clear understanding of data volume, RPO, and RTO can help businesses make informed decisions about their backup.
At OC IT Solutions, we strive to provide our clients with the peace of mind when it comes to their sensitive and valuable business data. We offer a host of cloud, offsite, and hybrid solutions that can fit every budget and size.
