Have you ever lost an hour of work on your computer?
Now imagine if you lost days or weeks of work – or imagine losing your client database, financial records, and all of the work files your company has ever produced or compiled.
Imagine what would happen if your network went down for days and you couldn’t access e-mail or the information on your PC. How devastating would that be?
Or, what if a major storm, flood, or fire destroyed your office and all of your files? Or if a virus wiped out your server…do you have an emergency recovery plan in place that you feel confident in?
How quickly do you think you could recover, if at all?
If you do not have good answers to the above questions or a rock-solid disaster recovery plan in place, you are quite literally playing Russian roulette with your business. With the number of threats constantly
1) Military-level security, data transfer, and data storage
This is fairly obvious; you want to make sure the company housing your data is actually secure. After all, we are talking about your financial information, client data, and other sensitive information about your company.
2) Multiple data centers that are geographically dispersed
Anyone versed in data security knows the best way to avoid loss is to build redundancy into your operations. All that means is that your remote backup service should store multiple copies of your data in more than one location. That way, if a terrorist attack or natural disaster destroys one of their locations, they have backups of your backup in a different city where the disaster did not strike.
3) The ability to receive overnight copies of your data another data storage device
If your entire network gets wiped out, you do NOT want Internet download to be your only option for recovering the data because it could take days or weeks. Therefore, you should only work with a remote backup provider that will provide overnight copies of your data via some physical storage device.
4) Make sure your data can be restored to a different computer than the one it was backed up from
Amazingly, some backups can only be restored to the same computer they came from. If the original computer was burned in a fire, stolen, or destroyed in a flood, you’re left without a backup.
5) Demand daily status reports of your backup
All backup services should send you a daily e-mail to verify if your backup actually ran AND to report failures or problems. The more professional providers should also allow you to notify more than one person (like a technician or your IT person) in addition to yourself.
6) Get help from a qualified technician
Many online backup services are “self-serve.” This allows them to provide a cheaper service to you but if you don’t set your system to back up correctly, the money you will save will be insignificant compared to the losses you’ll suffer. At the very least, ask your service provider to walk you through the steps on the phone or to check your settings to make sure you did the setup properly.
Summary
If you are a charity or non-profit organisation that is thinking about data management and backups we would love to help. You can call us on 0330 223 0085 or email [email protected].