Data Backup Is a Must Have for Any-Sized Business

You would be surprised what types of things can disrupt your business’ ability to operate. It could be something as benign as a power or Internet outage, something inevitable like a hardware component failure, or something so nefarious as ransomware. Regardless of what happens, every business should have a plan in place to respond to any situation and recover quickly and effectively. For the business that depends on data, having it properly backed up solves one major issue. This month, we thought we’d go over some of the basic questions you need to answer about your data backup and recovery process. 

Who Should Be In Charge of Data Backup?

For the average business, data backup is a matter left for the IT administrator, whether that is an in-house individual (or team) or an outsourced solution like the one the competent IT managers at XFER provide. For the smaller business, however, you may not have an IT administrator, and therefore may not have a plan to keep your data safe in lieu of an event where you would lose it. 

Some business owners may consider this process too expensive and try to find a solution that won’t cost any additional capital. Unfortunately, this is not one of the places where cutting costs is prudent. Think about how much your business depends on its data. Now think about if you lost it all...the lack of redundancy would surely make moving forward difficult. If you don’t have a dedicated IT administrator, you are responsible for ensuring that you have a data backup system in place so that you don’t lose it all if something terrible happens.

Where Should You Keep Your Backups?

This question takes a minute to answer. Consider your town floods and your business bears the brunt and all of your hardware is ruined. If you keep your data backup there, you might as well have not backed up the data at all, right? Well, what if you use an external hard drive to keep your backed up data safe, but you store it in your car and something happens when you aren’t available? You’re dealing with downtime. 

The proper answer is that the proper backup will be backed up both onsite and offsite. In the industry we call this the 3-2-1 rule. That’s three separate copies of the data, with two stored onsite and one stored offsite. That way you have all the problems covered. You will be protected no matter what happens. We recommend using cloud-based data storage for your offsite backup so that it is secure inside a data center rather than in the trunk of your car, but as long as you have three copies of the data, you should avoid a lot of the problems that surround potential data loss.

If you need help determining the right strategy to keep your data backed up and secure, the IT professionals at XFER can help. With our BDR system, we can get you a solution that will not only fulfill your data backup needs, it will put you in a better position for recovery, mitigating expensive downtime and getting your business back up and running fast should you need to restore data for any reason. 

Don’t fall victim to disaster and the profit-killing downtime that comes with it, give XFER a call today at 734-927-6666 / 800-GET-XFER to get started backing up your data the right way.