Offering BDR Solutions As Part of Our Austin Managed IT Services

On first glance it might seem a little dramatic to many readers to have a picture of an historic flood for a post on IT backup and disaster recovery, but if your business has ever been affected by data loss, you might think the image is a little restrained.  As an Austin managed IT services provider, we’re in the thick of it every day thinking about things like redundancy, co-location, disaster recovery support and making sure businesses in Austin always have the data they need.  For us, it doesn’t take any shift in perspective to realize that no business today runs very long without critical data and technology.  But a lot of business owners aren’t actively thinking about their dependence on IT. If you’re not, you really, really should be.  Not to be too alarmist, but 80 percent of small businesses suffering a major disaster go out of business in three years and 40 percent of small businesses are out of business with one year.  As a business owner, your data is absolutely critical and your back-up and disaster recovery plans are your insurance.

IT Back-Up and Disaster Recovery is A Big Concern, But Often Ignored

As with most everything in IT, there are statistics out there on small businesses and BDR. Here are some more headline-worthy ones.

• Vendors offering disaster recovery solutions have stated that between 60 and 70 percent of all problems that disrupt business are due to internal malfunctions of hardware or software.
• According to Timesavers International studies, the catastrophe most businesses experience is not fire, flood or earthquake, but rather something much more insidious—malware. In 2008,the United States was the top country for overall malicious activity, making up 23 percent of the total.
• Companies that aren’t able to resume operations within ten days (of a disaster hit) are not likely to survive.⁷
• Every week 140,000 hard drives crash in the United States.
• 31% of PC users have lost all of their files due to events beyond their control.
• Fewer than 10% of small businesses have IT disaster plans.
• 34% of companies fail to test their tape backups, and of those that do, 77% have found tape backup failures.

And then there’s this from Net-Security:

Nearly one-quarter (23%) of IT admins said backing up data that frequently is “not necessary” or that there’s “not much data” to backup. In direct contrast, 10% of IT admins said the biggest reason they do not conduct a daily backup is because they have too much data.

So, there is a lot of confusion, ignorance, and apathy in the small business community about an issue that is really very prevalent and serious.

Consumer-Facing Cloud Solutions Don’t Provide Enough Security

An important fact to keep in mind: free cloud-based solutions aren’t the answer, as Small Business Computing notes:

“Many cloud storage solutions do not offer historical backups, in the industry sometimes called incremental backups,” explains Jimi Mikusi, a small business cloud specialist.  “These vanilla, and often free, cloud storage solutions might only permit retrieving the most recent copy, and thus you are unable to recover data from the past. An effective small business backup strategy must start with a plan detailing requirements such as how far in the past it is required to access data. Too often the decision-making process begins with budget, which often defaults to $0, leading to free services that miss business requirements. Remember too, that disaster survivors don’t receive a get-out-of-jail-free card. You still need to meet compliance and security requirements for your data. Make sure that whatever data recovery option you select meets those requirements.”

An Austin Managed IT Services Company Here to Help Keep You Running Securely

When you’re ready to get the security your business needs–or have questions about what those needs actually are– we’re here to help.  We’ll want to assess your particular requirements: how far back do you need to back-up data? how quickly do you need to be back on-line in the case of a disaster?  What are the security and compliance mandates businesses in your industry need to meet?  We’ll devise a solution that fits your needs and will always include end-to-end management of your back-up systems, with regular testing.
 

Magnet Solutions Group is an Austin Managed IT Services company.  If you have questions about your business’ technology needs, we’d be happy to talk with you.  Give us a call at 512-298-2101.