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Webinar: Home or work PC downtime reduced to minutes

Are you working from home and/or dependent on your Windows laptop/tablet? You can’t be down for hours or days anymore. Learn about practical and affordable solutions to reduce your risk.

Attend this 30-minute webinar to learn:

  • Most common causes of computer failures
  • What is different about this backup and how it works
  • How to recovery solution works

You will walk away with an understanding of the practical and affordable solution to reduce your risk. Save your spot now!

When: Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Where: Online Webinar – Register here

Do You Have A Business Continuity Plan?

Thirty per cent of business don’t!

At some point in the lifespan of any business, disaster will strike. It’s inevitable. From unsuspecting employees letting lose ruthless viruses, to something much less preventable, such as an electrical fire, any loss of data can be detrimental. The key component to managing any business is having a business continuity plan, so that when disaster recovery is needed, it’s only a phone call away.

In a previous post, we talked about the importance of data backup. Making sure your data is backed up in the proper mediums is fantastic but, having a plan with what to do once the system crashes is just as crucial as saving the data itself.

This is where the idea of business continuity comes into play. Having the ability to continue running your business during these emergency cases will minimize revenue loss, as every minute a server is down is a hit to the company.

There are many examples available of companies that were saved simply by having a backup plan in place, such as the one about Cantey Technology, who lost its entire operation to a lightning strike in 2013.

According to Tracy Rock, InvenioIT.com, the office building in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, was home to the IT company, which hosted servers for more than 200 clients.

The fire caused the entire network infrastructure to melt, burning cable and computer alike. With equipment destroyed beyond repair and an unusable office, a panic should have set about the entire organization. Instead, states Rock, Cantey’s clients had no idea.

As part of their business continuity plan, Cantey had already moved its clients servers to a remote data center, where continual backups were stored. Staff of Cantey were displaced in a temporary office, but no client experienced any disruption of service. Although Cantey Technology had no control over the force of nature, they were still able to avoid massive loss.

Businesses always believe it won’t happen to them, that the backups they have are enough, but the reality is, they aren’t.

According to InventoIT’s 2017 disaster recovery statistics, hardware failure was the leading cause of all unplanned downtime, with power outages accounting for an additional 35 per cent

Even with backups, if a company isn’t sure what to do once the power goes out, there is still unplanned downtime that adds up. Costing between $926 to $17,244 per minute, these numbers include lost revenue, lost productivity, recovery expenses, equipment replacement, and more.

The same statistic report mentioned that 30 per cent of businesses do not actually have a business continuity plan in place, and a portion of those companies haven’t even talked about it.

With the inevitability of a disaster strike, do you want to be apart of that 30 per cent?


If you are curious as to how much your business would lose in the event of a disaster you can input all your data into our online calculator. The results might shock you.

Backup vs. Business Continuity

Using RTO to Better Plan for Your Business

Conclusion

reasons-for-downtime
Making sure your business can continue operating in case of a disaster is just as essential to small businesses as it is to the largest enterprises. For that reason, business continuity using data backup is an essential solution that small businesses should deploy.

Data backup solutions come in all different flavors. Cloud-based solutions are increasingly popular, but they provide only a partial answer. On-site solutions also have their weaknesses.

The answer is a hybrid cloud. It provides the best of all worlds: you can recover data swiftly from a local device for the most common causes of data loss, but you have all your data safely stored in the cloud for more extreme events in which the local device is destroyed or unavailable.

Executive Summary

Small businesses in general don’t have the same IT budgets and staffs as larger enterprises. Yet just like larger organizations they need to protect their data and make sure they can get back to business rapidly after a disaster or other event that compromises their data and systems.

We will discuss what’s at stake when it comes to not just protecting, but also managing, your data (hint: your business). We’ll explain why it’s important to think in terms of business continuity rather than simply data backup. And we’ll look at how to calculate the all-important Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) so that you can get what you need from your business continuity vendor.

Small businesses in general don’t have the same IT budgets and staffs as larger enterprises. Yet just like larger organizations they need to protect their data and make sure they can get back to business rapidly after a disaster or other event that compromises their data and systems.

We will discuss what’s at stake when it comes to not just protecting, but also managing, your data (hint: your business). We’ll explain why it’s important to think in terms of business continuity rather than simply data backup. And we’ll look at how to calculate the all-important Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) so that you can get what you need from your business continuity vendor.

Data backup versus business continuity: what’s the difference?

Although overlapping, these terms represent uniquely different mindsets when it comes to data protection.

Data backup answers the questions: is my data safe? Can I get it back in case of a failure?

Business continuity, on the other hand, involves thinking about the business at a higher level, and asks: how quickly can I get my business operating again in case of system failure?
Thinking about data backup is a good first step. But in case of failure, you have to get that data back and restore it quickly enough so your business doesn’t suffer. For example, if your server dies—and remember, hardware failure is the No. 1 cause of lost data—you wouldn’t be able to quickly get back to work if you only had file-level backup. For you to start working again, your server would need to be replaced, all software re-installed, data re-installed and then the whole system would need to be configured with your settings and preferences. This process could take hours or even days—and in the meantime, your users can’t get their jobs done.

Calculate your RTO and RPO easily with our online tool.

What To Look for in a Business Continuity Vendor

When comparing vendors for a backup solution, small businesses say that reliability (33 per- cent) and price (29 percent) top the list of factors that drive their choices. But they should consider other factors as well.

  • Superior Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) — Think in terms of business continuity rather than simply backup, and calculate how much downtime your business can endure and still survive (RTO) as well as how much data you can afford to lose (RPO). Choose a vendor that can guarantee top RTOs and RPOs.
  • Hybrid cloud backup—As discussed above, taking a hybrid approach fixes the vulnerabilities that a cloud-only or local-only solution possess.
  • Image-based backup—Make sure that the backup solution takes images of all your data and systems, and doesn’t simply copy the files alone.
  • Instant local and off-site virtualization.
  • Screenshot backup verification. What good is a backup if it’s not working?
  • Images saved as VMDK for faster recovery times.
  • For more information contact us by e-mail or call us at 403-455-5969.

5 Ways Business Continuity Improves Your Business’s Profitability – Webinar Recording

How can you ensure your business can keep running after an unplanned event, ranging from something minor to a disaster?

That’s why having business continuity in place should be a priority, not just because it’s best practice but because it’s good for your bottom line as well.

Watch our partner, Datto, and disaster recovery expert, Donna Childs, in this informative webinar.

You will learn:

  • Why business continuity puts money back into your pocket
  • How to reduce costs through business continuity
  • Effective strategies to increase revenues through continuity measures
  • And more…

Resources

Download Slides 

RTO Calculator