What is Business Continuity?
What is Business Continuity? Trying to define it isn’t always easy. Everyone seems to have a unique definition these days. Depending on how your business operates, you may think about it a lot differently than the guy next to you.
Let’s begin by defining what business continuity is NOT.
A data backup is the result of copying or archiving files and folders for the purpose of being able to restore them in case of data loss. Data loss can be caused by many things ranging from computer viruses to hardware failures, file corruptions etc.
Disaster recovery is the area of security planning that deals with protecting an organization from the effects of significant negative events.
A False Sense of Security
While you can take precautions like creating backups of your sensitive data, sometimes that’s not enough. If you forget to perform the backup or the backup process fails and you’re not protected. Furthermore, when you only back up your files once a day, you’re left vulnerable to the loss of an entire day’s work. Then, if you don’t properly validate your backup files, you could be in for an unpleasant surprise when you actually try to use those files to restore operations. Lastly, when you only back up your raw data, rather than all your application and server configuration files, it could take several days to restore your practice. — Because you will also have to rebuild your servers, operating systems, applications, etc.
Entire systems can fall victim to ransomware.
Individual identities can be stolen.
Natural disasters can wipe out entire facilities, so it is important to choose a provider with multiple, geographically separated data centers.
How Vulnerable Are You?
Does your business have the IT resources to effectively recover from a major outage? Make sure you’re weighing all of the factors around the costs of downtime. Here are the facts:
• US businesses lose $12 billion annually due to data loss.
• 93% of companies that lose their data center for 10+ days file for bankruptcy within one year.
Visit this link to determine an estimated cost of downtime.
https://www.datto.com/rto/marketnow/
The Better Way: Business Continuity
Business continuity describes a complete solution for backup and disaster recovery. A true business continuity solution will protect data on-premises and in the cloud.
Business continuity goes a step further and offers you the ability to restore your data, which we call disaster recovery.
Whether a business is faced with a natural disaster, or one man-made, a strong solution will have you up and running in minutes.
Solutions that leverage the hybrid cloud can guarantee a quicker restore time as well. Why? Local backups are great to keep data stored on local devices, but if something happens to that device? A hybrid cloud backup solution takes an initial backup on a local device, and then replicates the backup to a cloud server. A hybrid model works to alleviate the vulnerabilities by implementing both processes to fill in the gaps. That’s intelligent business continuity.
