Tip of the Week: Backup’s Value, in Two Scenarios

Each week, we try to provide some tips to help you out in some way. This time, we want to take a somewhat different approach and instead present you with two potential scenarios that your business could encounter—one with and one without a backup solution in play—and let you see the benefit that our tip this week (protect your business with a backup solution) can present.

Scenario 1: No Backup

Chuck runs a small business that does a fair amount of work with various clients and customers, so he relies on an extensive record-keeping system to ensure that his agreements and contracts are up-to-date and honored. There are also the tools that enable his necessary inventory to be maintained, automatically contacting the appropriate vendors and suppliers when his materials run low. Chuck relies on his technology, as it has promoted growth and has expanded its reach.

Unfortunately, a member of Chuck’s staff is using their email one day and automatically opens an attachment that contains ransomware. Chuck learns that this has locked him out of his entire system, preventing him from accessing any of his files or tools. To eliminate the threat, Chuck has no choice but to completely wipe his systems and start fresh… but in doing so, he is forced to sacrifice all the data that his operations rely upon. A few difficult months later, Chuck is unable to recover from this monumental setback, and closes the business.

Scenario 2: Backup

Laura runs a bustling small business, serving a healthy assortment of customers and clientele. To keep track of everything, she makes use of customer relationship management and inventory management tools, in addition to her HR software. While her own innate business sense has powered her success, her prioritization of technology as an indispensable asset has helped Laura apply these insights in a meaningful way.

This approach also helps when a storm strikes and surges power into her location and fries her infrastructure. While replacing the equipment is going to be costly, the true cost would come from the data loss. Fortunately, Laura had taken the advice of her managed service provider and implemented a comprehensive backup solution, which had proactively taken incremental backups of her data and saved them in an off-site data center. As a result, her employees can work from home to some extent while replacements can be procured (with the proper surge protection now implemented) and maintain the business somewhat. After a brief interlude, Laura’s business can resume its full operations.

So yes, our tip to you is to have a backup solution in place, that meets certain best practices:

• You have a total of (at least) three copies of your data.
• Two of these copies are maintained as backups.
• (At least) one of these copies is stored offsite in a cloud solution.
  • Ideally, this cloud solution would itself have copies stored in various places for redundancy.

Network Solutions Unlimited can help you establish the kind of data backup and recovery strategy that you need. We can also help you develop an entire business continuity plan to mitigate the aftereffects of any kind of data loss scenario, all while providing you with more tips and best practices to minimize the possibility of such a scenario in the first place.

Reach out to us at (217) 428-6449 to learn more and subscribe to our blog today for more insights.