What is Disaster Recovery and why should your business have it?

Disaster Recovery (DR) is the area of security planning that deals with protecting an organisation from the effects of significant negative events. These 'negative events' essentially include anything that puts an organisation's operations at risk.

20 years ago, disaster was usually delivered by Mother Nature as survival of the business depended on the brick and mortar infrastructure. This included earthquakes, cyclones, fires and floods, among others. Today the potential for disasters has multiplied ten fold as it now comes in many different forms – the most prominent being data loss.

Businesses large and small create and manage vast volumes of electronic information or data. Most of that data is important - some is absolutely vital to the survival and continued operation of the business. The impact of data loss or corruption from hardware failure, human error, hacking or malware can be crippling.

Here are some of the most common forms of disaster affecting modern businesses because of data loss:

• Cyber attacks/Ransomware: Anyone connected to a network is at risk of a cyber attack. Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on sophisticated security solutions to mitigate these risks, yet it seems every week there is another Fortune 500 company in the headlines because of a breach. Just ask the clients of Ashley Madison!
• Human error: Undoubtedly one of the most common causes of data loss, and often the most costly. Slippery fingers on a keyboard have brought down entire companies, from deleting a critical email to wiping out entire data archives containing years of historical data.
• Site disaster: Your office, data center and entire building are all possible points of failure. However, in the event of a site disaster you can rebuild your building, but maintaining your data exclusively within those four walls could mean you lose your data indefinitely.
• Theft: Hardware is a lot smaller today than the paper weight objects of 20 years ago, as mobility is a key consideration. Unfortunately, this makes the job for thieves much easier - think laptops and smartphones, which become even more of a target when used outside of the office.
• IT system failure: Unfortunately, machines break all the time. Vehicles, appliances and yes, computer hardware. When an IT system crashes, data loss is a common side effect. All of the data your hard drives hold can potentially be lost forever.

It's clear, a disaster recovery plan for data backup and restoration of electronic information is essential, regardless of whether you're a one-man band, an SMB or a global enterprise.

With the recent mainstream adoption of cloud services (Xero, Office 365 and SalesForce, for example), DR solutions are today readily available, easy to use and cost effective. Given the size of the market and the significance of the issue a number of specialist DR providers are active in the market specifically to support businesses.

KeepItSafe is such a company with a strong local and international market presence. Their DR solutions provide businesses with an all-in-one online backup and IT disaster recovery solution designed to recover business servers and get enterprises up and running in just minutes. It is the next-gen solution for business continuity, backup, and recovery that will fully protect physical, virtual, and cloud resources.

"Think of it this way," says Iain Hook, general manager of KeepItSafe. "You've got building and contents insurance, why not your data, which is essentially the backbone of your business?" In the event of a disaster, KeepItSafe (live support is available 24/7) can recover your lost data literally within minutes.

"We recognise each business has its own unique needs so we offer versatile and scalable solutions – as the demands of your business changes our solutions adjust accordingly," Hook says. "For SMBs requiring cost effective online backup solutions as their disaster recovery plan, through to a Corporate requiring onsite replication of their IT environment as part of their disaster recovery plan, we can provide a tailored, simple to use, fully supported and cost-effective solution that can mitigate all that nature and the modern day world can put in front of you."

If you would like to know more about KeepItSafe's DR solutions, click here or call the team on 0800 14 11 14 as we can provide a quick consultation on the phone and a remote session if necessary to assess your company's unique data backup needs.