Companies Not Prepared for Disaster Could Pay the Price (Opinion)

One of the worst things that can happen to a company is to lose data.

Office fires, crashed computers and disks, backup systems that were never tested or poorly designed, angry employees out to cause mischief — these are real-world issues that take place daily.

The important question, therefore: “Is your business prepared to deal with one or more of these issues?”

The Strategic Research Institute says companies that can’t get back into normal operations within 10 days “are not likely to survive.”

The National Archives and Records Administration in Washington is even more direct: “93 percent of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster.” Fifty percent filed for bankruptcy immediately after 10 days.

I could go on with statistics and studies, but you get the point.  Or perhaps you do not get the point. I have found that most small and mid-sized businesses only give glancing attention to the notion of data backup and recovery and much less to the notion of business continuity.

In today’s world, the notion of “data backup” seems pretty simple. There are many online backup services that can be purchased that will place software agents on your desktop or laptop and keep it backed up at all times for around $60 a year. Problem easily solved. Or is it?

You see, the important data for most businesses tends not to reside on desktops and laptops. Important data tends to reside on file servers and within software applications in databases.

Those $60-a-year backup solutions that will back up your documents directory and sub-directory, your photos and your music have little to no idea how to deal with servers, applications and databases in a business environment.

Fortunately, there are many options and opportunities for SMBs to take advantage of business-ready online backup solutions. In fact, a recent survey said 66 percent of all businesses are currently considering some type of online, or “cloud”-based, backup solution.

These businesses are looking for a solution that optimizes the combination of “fast recovery speed,” “security,” “affordability” and, most importantly, “reliability” for their companies. The solution should offer backup strategies for servers, applications, databases, desktops, laptops and mobile devices.

When dealing with any backup solution, the phrases “bare metal recovery” and “application-aware” are very important. The first means that everything about your old computer can be completely recreated on new, and possibly completely different, hardware. The second means that applications and related databases can be individually recovered to different computers. Without these capabilities, getting back online could take many days.

Security in the cloud-based world is well defined by standards. The numeric/alphabet soup includes FIPS 140-2, SAS70/ISO27001 and NIST. Data should move encrypted to the cloud-based storage so that prying eyes are thwarted.

The determination of reliability of a cloud-based backup solution requires research. How is data stored? How does it backup data? Does it have multiple data centers? Conversations are required. Customer reviews must be researched and reference interviews conducted.

The question of affordability is one that each individual business must determine. There are requirements and services with varying quality/risk ratios and price structures. And, as with most things, there are build-it-yourself options and fully packaged options to consider.

While this all might seem daunting, ensuring your business has an adequate data backup and recovery strategy is an important process for management to undertake. In the time I’ve taken in writing this column, statistics indicate more than 140,000 disk drives have crashed. I hope yours wasn’t one of them.

Steven Hankins is CEO and co-founder of Accio.us, a technology company providing advisory and management services for small to medium-sized businesses. He can be reached at [email protected].