One of the most important assets in businesses today is DATA. IT departments are facing an array of security threats including cyber attacks such as ransomware, whereby malicious software blocks access to a computer system until a sum of money is paid. Other threats could involve natural disasters such as flood, earthquakes & power outages, to name a few.
A recent survey by Gartner stated that 40% of businesses will not survive if they lose their data for more than 24 hours. This is why it is of paramount importance to have a secure and reliable Backup & Disaster Recovery solution. Backup & Disaster Recovery has seen a revolution over the past decade with cloud technologies acting as a catalyst for the shift in the way that business is viewing their Backup & Disaster Recovery plans.
IT managers are recognising Virtual assets as a way to maximise resources for their Backup & Recovery solutions and as confidence grows in the security of the cloud along with the ever increasing Internet speeds, which facilitate backing up vast quantities of data over the wire, more and more businesses are turning to the cloud as their offsite backup solution.
The cost of storing data has also dramatically decreased over the last decade making a cloud solution not only more cost effective but a less cumbersome solution to the traditional tape backups whereby a courier would need to physically take a backup tape and store it in an offsite location. With the cloud, businesses will never reach capacity as there is a limitless amount of storage for their backups so as your data volumes increase you can easily scale up your data storage. A cloud-based Backup and Recovery solution, however, is something that businesses should evaluate and have a clearly defined strategy for. It would be foolhardy to jump in with both feet first without considering some important factors, such as data security: make sure that your cloud provider is ISO27001 certified to ensure that your data will always be safe and always secure. Scrutinise the SLA’s to ensure that your provider will always have your best interests at heart.
Industry leader in Virtualised Data Backup and Recovery, Veeam, recommend that every business should have three copies of their data at any one time. In real terms this means the actual copy you are using along with 2 further copies. It is a good idea to keep the 2 backup copies on different media and in different locations. One reason for this is that each type of media has its own vulnerabilities, so this will avoid both backups being susceptible to the same threats.
Finally, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans are all very well but they need to be tested regularly to ensure that they will stand up in a real life disaster situation. Datanet can be part of your Business Continuity Plan, not only can we backup your data in our London Edge Data Centre, we can support you in the event the worst should happen and you lose your data. We have Customer Suites, in our Data Centre facility in Fleet, that you can use and our helpful staff will be able to spin up as many virtual servers as you need on which you can restore your data
For more information about how Datanet can help you with your Backup and Disaster Recovery solution, please call us today on 01252 810010 or email us on sales@datanet.co.uk
