Tech Lover 9

Insurance provides the comfort of knowing that you will be taken care of in an unexpected situation. From general liability to data breach insurance, you make sure your business is covered. You prepare all aspects of your company for those unforeseen situations, but have you forgotten one of your most important assets? Have you insured your data? Investing in a disaster recovery solution can provide the same insurance for your company’s mission-critical data to ensure your business is always up and running.

After a disruption of IT services, it is critical to get your business back online quickly. Studies have shown that even small outages can have an effect on profits and customer loyalty. Further, every 24-hour outage that a company experiences decreases overall chances of business survival by 50 percent. According to Vicky McKim, Master Business Continuity Professional and member of the Business Continuity Institute, “A three-day outage can close a business permanently.” Don’t be caught unprepared: invest in disaster recovery services and insure your business for the future.

Disaster recovery acts as a mechanism to protect your mission-critical data and involves resumption and restoration of those operations during a failure. A disaster recovery plan defines the resources, actions, tasks and data required to manage the technology recovery effort, helping to simplify and smooth the transition process. McKim suggests that businesses should look into purchasing cloud disaster recovery services as soon as they open their doors or at the end of their current recovery contract commitments.

The gap in disaster planning for many small- to mid-sized businesses and for those looking to reduce the overhead of the corporate data center is their backup strategy and plan documentation. Most of those with contracted or recovery subscription have realized that those services are a gamble at best, and there is still no guarantee you will be allocated what you contracted. Cloud can help eliminate gaps in your disaster recovery plan.

Disaster recovery services in the cloud are simple, manageable and cost effective compared to traditional methods. They can reduce recurring monthly costs by over 80 percent and give you control of the recovery strategy, management, testing and execution at time of disaster. There are several benefits of using cloud disaster recovery services, including:

• Ability to suspend your recovery servers so you are only charged for the storage of your backup data
• Accessibility to your cloud disaster recovery system through any device with Internet access
• Ability to activate the servers when you need to test or recover
• No recovery contract for data center space that sits unused for most of each year
• No costs for duplicate hardware
• No support fees for testing your data backups other than the metered network
• Server usage fees apply only for the hours the server is running

Statistically, those who have a business continuity management program in place that includes testing and maintaining their disaster recovery plans have increased their ability to survive even a catastrophic event by 90 percent.

Don’t risk losing your data, your customers or your business. A business would never operate without insurance and cloud disaster recovery services are just that, insuring that you can still operate if your primary data access is disrupted. Cloud computing solutions provide just this – a flexible and attainable solution for all businesses.