If your data is important to your business and you cannot afford to have your operations halted for days – even weeks – due to data loss or corruption, then you need to read this report and act on the information shared. This report will outline the most commonly made, costly mistakes that most small business owners make with their data backups.
You’ll Discover:
- What remote, offsite, or managed backups are, and why EVERY business should have them in place.
- 7 critical characteristics you should absolutely demand from any remote backup service; do NOT trust your data to anyone who does not meet these criteria.
- Where tape backups fail and give you a false sense of security.
- Frightening trends, cases, and questions every business owner should know and consider regarding data security.
- The single most important thing to look for in a remote backup service provider.
Dear Colleague,
Have you ever lost an hour of work on your computer?
Now imagine if you lost days or weeks of work – or imagine losing your client database, financial records, and all of the work files your company has ever produced or compiled.
Imagine what would happen if your network went down for days and you couldn’t access e-mail or the information on your PC. How devastating would that be? Or, what if a major storm, flood, or fire destroyed your office and all of your files?
Or if a virus wiped out your server…do you have an emergency recovery plan in place that you feel confident in?
How quickly do you think you could recover, if at all?
If you do not have good answers to the above questions or a rock-solid disaster recovery plan in place, you are quite literally playing Russian roulette with your business. With the number of threats constantly growing, it’s not a matter of if you will have a problem, but rather a matter of when.
But that could never happen to me! (and other lies business owners like too believe about their businesses...)
After working with over hundreds of small and mid-size businesses in the southwest, we found that 6 out of 10 businesses will experience some type of major network or technology disaster that will end up costing them between $9,000 and $60,000 in repairs and restoration costs on average.
That doesn’t even include lost productivity, sales, and client goodwill that can be damaged when a company can’t operate or fulfill on its promises due to technical problems.
While it may be difficult to determine the actual financial impact data loss would have on your business, you can’t deny the fact that it would have a major negative effect.
"But I already back up my data", you say...
If you are like most business owners, you’ve been smart enough to set up a tape backup. But know this:
The average failure rate for a tape backup is 100% – ALL tape backups fail at some point in time.
Incredible, isn’t it? Most people don’t realize that ALL tape drives fail. But what’s really dangerous is that most companies don’t realize it happened until it’s too late.
That’s why history is riddled with stories of companies losing millions of dollars worth of data. In almost every case, these businesses had some type of backup system in place, but were sickened to find out it wasn’t working when they needed it most.
While you should maintain a local backup of your data, a tape backup will NOT offer you protection if…
- Your tape drive malfunctions rendering it useless and making it impossible to restore your data. IMPORTANT: It is very common for a tape drive to malfunction without giving any warning signs.
- Your office (and everything in it) gets destroyed by a fire, flood, hurricane, tornado, or other natural disaster.
- The physical tapes you are backing your data up to become corrupted due to heat or mishandling.
- A virus spoils the data stored on the tape drive. Some of the more aggressive viruses not only corrupt the data, but they don’t allow anyone to access the data on the drive.
- Someone in your office accidentally formats the tape, erasing everything on it.
- Theft – a disgruntled employee intentionally erases everything, or a thief breaks in and steals ALL of your equipment.
- A faulty sprinkler system “waters” all of your electronic equipment.
Bottom line: You do NOT want to find out your backup was not working when you need it most. Frightening Trends, Cases, and Questions You Should Consider:
- Tape drives fail on average at 100%; that means ALL tape drives fail at some point and do NOT offer complete protection for your data if a natural disaster, fire, or terrorist attack destroys your office and everything in it. Business owners who were hit by hurricanes like Katrina learned a hard lesson about keeping remote backups of their data.
- 93% of companies that lost their data for 10 days or more filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster, and 50% filed for bankruptcy immediately. (Source: National Archives & Records Administration in Washington.)
- 20% of small to medium businesses will suffer a major disaster causing loss of critical data every 5 years. (Source: Richmond House Group)
- This year, 40% of small to medium businesses that manage their own network and use the Internet for more than e-mail will have their network accessed by a hacker, and more than 50% won’t even know they were attacked. (Source: Gartner Group)
- About 70% of business people have experienced (or will experience) data loss due to accidental deletion, disk or system failure, viruses, fire or some other disaster (Source: Carbonite, an online backup service)
- The first reaction of employees who lose their data is to try to recover the lost data themselves by using recovery software or either restarting or unplugging their computer — steps that can make later data recovery impossible. (Source: 2005 global survey by Minneapolisbased Ontrack Data Recovery
Remote Backups: What They Are And Why EVERY Business Should Have Them In Place
The ONLY way to completely protect your data and guarantee that you could restore it all after a major disaster is by maintaining an up-to-date copy of your data offsite in a high-security facility.
Remote backups, also called offsite backups, online backups, or managed backups, is a service that allows you to maintain a secure copy of your data in a different location than your office.
Usually this type of backup is done automatically via the Internet after hours to a high-security facility. There is no question that every business owner should have an offsite copy of their data; however, there ARE big differences among remote backup services and it’s critical that you choose a good provider or you could end up paying a lot of money only to discover that recovering your data – the very reason why you set up remote backups in the first place – is not an easy, fast, or simple job.
