In one of our recent brainstorming meetings, I asked a question. That question was: “What is the one thing you wish our clients knew?” Someone answered that question with the simple phrase, “Backups suck.” If you’re fairly diligent on your technology, you’re probably thinking, “Wait, what?”
Technology changes at the speed of light. A television that comes out one year is half the price the next year, because the technology becomes outdated so quickly. While the business technology world may not operate quite as quickly in the adoption of new technology, I have to break the news to you – the reason this engineer said “backups suck” is because there’s a new, better way to manage your data and downtime issues. That’s through a business continuity strategy. Here are a few reasons to modernize your backups with business continuity.
It’s short-sighted.
So what were you thinking when you developed your backup strategy? It probably went something along the lines of, “If we go down. We need to make sure we have a copy of our data.” It’s a completely reasonable way to think about your data 3 years ago. But now that business continuity is around, you need to start thinking a little deeper. For starters, every single moment of downtime is costing you money. For some organizations, it’s a lot of money. The majority of organizations can’t afford to be down for very long. In fact, our business continuity infographic states that for SMBs with fewer than 100 employees, a single day of downtime for a single server costs an average of $12,500. Woah. That’s a lot of cash for a small business owner!
You have no idea when you’ll be back up and running.
So, now that you know that downtime is expensive, can you tell me how long you expect it to take your IT department or MSP to get you back up and running after your network goes down? 24 hours? 4 days? A week? Longer? With a business continuity solution you’ll go through the recovery time objective with us to determine how fast you need to be up and running. We’ll carefully balance that objective with your budget to choose a solution that works perfectly for you.
You have no idea what data will be viable and it could completely fail you.
Here’s something pretty crazy about backups – sometimes IT providers don’t test them. That means if a backup fails for a few days the day you go down, you could lose all of the data between those few days. If you’re focused exclusively on hardware backups, you better make sure that system is in tip-top shape, because it’s your lifeline. That brings me to our next point:
It’s a reactive insurance policy at BEST.
You have health insurance, right? Obama made you get it, so odds are you have it. To me, exclusive local backup is like having an insurance policy, but allowing your health to go to complete garbage and then expecting the doctors to save you. Maybe a bit of an extreme example, but that’s where you’re at on local backup. You’re not focused on what damage it’ll do if you’re down for too long, how much data will be available to you or how your systems could potentially fail you. It’s a pretty risky gamble.
Enter Business Continuity. It’s a solution that can take you back up and running as quickly as immediately to within a few hours. It segments your data, stores it in the cloud and virtualizes your entire server environment, so literally the moment your environment goes down, there’s this entire office hanging out in the cloud for you to start working from. Technology evolves at the speed of light… are you ready to stop operating in the world of local backups?
4 Reasons to Resolve Tickets When Your Engineer Responds the First Time
You might also like
