Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
By Chris Shakeshaft, Client Manager, Yorb
Business has become extremely reliant on technology; therefore, it is incredibly important to have robust solutions for data recovery that allow your business to continue as quickly as possible should an unexpected event happen.
Do you know where your data is and how it’s protected, if at all? The IT landscape is changing so fast that it can be easy to lose track of what’s local and remote and whether there is an adequate backup and restore plan for it.
Have you been keeping up with all these ransomware stories? A large part of why businesses knuckle under and pay the ransom is that they’re not confident of their ability to restore their systems to working order in a timely manner. Or it turns out their backups have also been corrupted by the ransomware, meaning entire systems are inaccessible. I don’t mean to scare you, but have you thought about how your business would come back from something like that?
In a lot of scenarios, the issue isn’t whether you have a backup but how long it would take you to restore from backup — the window within which you experience downtime that prevents you continuing with your ordinary business functions.
Have you ever calculated how much business you would lose if your financial or order management system were unexpectantly offline for a day, let alone a week or more?
For example, a business with 2 million [dollars] turnover, 50 employees paid $35K on average and 3TB of data could expect to lose $19,500 during the estimated 9 hours it would take to restore systems using conventional backup tech.
What if you lost a week’s worth of customer data or financial or inventory data?
Or a month’s worth? How long would it take you to reconstruct that information?
Recovery time objective (RTO) is the target period of time for downtime in the event of IT downtime while recovery point objective (RPO) is the maximum length of time from the last data restoration point.
Aside from the monetary loss, what about your company’s reputation? If you were unable to conduct business during an extended downtime, or couldn’t respond to customer enquires because you’ve lost their data, how patient would you expect customers to be?
What kind of regulations would you be in breach of if you lost customer data or other sensitive data?
Frankly, the backup and recovery solutions that just a few years ago were considered perfectly adequate, or even state of the art, haven’t kept up with today’s threats. The risk posed by downtime and data loss is also greater because our dependence on digital systems keeps increasing. The good news is there are also better solutions available now.
If you would like to discuss options with Yorb and get peace of mind around your data recovery and business continuity, please contact Chris: chris.shakeshaft@yorb.tech
