XFER Blog

Imagine waking up one day and finding your phone completely wiped—no contacts, no photos, no texts. Feels like a nightmare, right? Now, picture that happening to an entire business. All the files, data, and systems—gone. Scary stuff. That’s exactly why businesses need a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan. It’s like having a safety net to help you get back on your feet when things go sideways. Here’s how to build one.

We haven’t been shy about how essential data backups are, simply because there is always the chance that your business will encounter some form of disaster… but, what if something interferes with these backups?

This danger is one reason that immutable backups are utilized. Let’s go over what this means, and how it helps.

The recent CrowdStrike outage that disrupted many Microsoft-run systems has made headlines, even if it didn’t affect you directly. With so many organizations relying on Windows, this incident caused an unprecedented number of computer crashes, impacting over 8.5 million systems worldwide. The outage didn’t just cost businesses billions in lost revenue—it also led to the cancellation of 3,000 flights, throwing travel plans into chaos. As the largest outage in history, it served as a stark reminder that the technology we depend on daily isn’t foolproof. Today, we’ll explore key takeaways from the CrowdStrike outage and how businesses can better prepare for such events.

Disaster Recovery (DR) provides your business with tools and processes to restore normal operations following a disruption. Think of it as a safety net for when things go wrong. The primary goal of your disaster recovery system is to restore critical business functions as quickly as possible.

When disaster strikes your business, it can cause a lot of problems; and many of them aren’t a direct result of the disaster itself. It’s for this reason it’s important to prepare your technology for a potential disaster. Here are four of the best ways to get your technology ready.

Unfortunately, we have yet another reason to reflect on the importance of data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity for organizations everywhere. A week ago today, Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Texas, downgrading to a tropical storm, but only after it had already caused estimated damages totaling over $5 million amongst the islands of middle America.

You don’t want to take chances with something as important as your data backup. In the past, businesses would use tape backups performed manually at specific intervals to back up their data to physical drives for storage. However, tape backup has largely become obsolete compared to modern solutions like automated backup and disaster recovery (BDR).

IT professionals have all but proclaimed the tape backup system, which dominated the data backup space for decades, to be all but dead. This declaration may have been premature however. Over the past several years, there has been a resurgence in companies that use tape backup. This week, we will go into why businesses are willingly utilizing what can only be described as an antiquated technology for their system redundancy. 

If a business is in operation today, it needs to have preparations in order to protect itself and its data from potential disasters—a fact that has only become more pressing as digital data has become the norm. Let’s take a few moments to go over what today’s businesses need to include in their disaster recovery preparations to ensure that their data remains protected.

We are of the firm belief that data backup is crucial to the continued success of any business. It can be the differentiating factor for a business that is successful and one that less unfortunate circumstances knock them off the grid for good. You can invest in your business’ future with a solid data backup solution, even if it’s there simply as a preventative measure.

How seriously does your business take data backup and disaster recovery? You might not be able to predict the future or what might occur, but you can at least prepare for it to mitigate the damage it could potentially bring about. Today, we want to share some of the best practices you can implement to combat even the worst disaster scenarios your organization might encounter.

In business, you need to be ready for anything, including potential disaster scenarios. Therefore, it stands to reason that you have a solid disaster recovery plan in place to help you address them should the need arise. We’ve outlined three disaster recovery best practices you should consider for your business continuity strategy, as well as some tips to help you implement them seamlessly into your own operations.

Look, nobody likes picturing the worst-case scenario that could befall their business—even doing so might feel a bit like memorizing a divorce attorney's number as you write your wedding vows. However, failing to have some strategy in place could very well lead to your business’ downfall. What does it take to properly plan and prepare for the possibility of a disaster, and the associated recovery you’ll have to undergo?

Disaster recovery is one of those platforms that businesses don’t want to have to use, but need to spend ample time planning in case they do. This is rather unique in business, so only by truly understanding what you need to get out of your disaster recovery strategy can you create the comprehensive DR system that your business requires. 

Over the week of June 14, a lot of applications and websites experienced outages, creating problems for many companies until it was resolved. Not only did these outages create business continuity issues, they’ve also exposed just how vulnerable the Internet is to these kinds of issues. Let’s take a look at what happened.

Managed IT services have grown from a niche offering to a well-known concept in recent years, with many businesses already relying on outsourced IT services to some degree. In many ways, this only makes sense, as it allows businesses to enjoy access to services that would otherwise cost too much for them to independently adopt and support.

With a business’ data being such a priority nowadays, protecting it against all circumstances needs to be appropriately attended to. One fundamental component of this protection is the implementation of a proper backup strategy. Let’s go over the most foundational element of a successful backup, and how we recommend businesses to accomplish it: redundancy.

The Novel Coronavirus has made its way around the world and it has certainly changed the way a lot of businesses do things. Some businesses have put in some type of disaster recovery platform. This is basically a plan for returning to continuity after some type of disaster, but we are seeing that many business continuity plans were not broad enough to take on a worldwide pandemic. Sadly, many of these businesses won’t open again.

Data backup is important. A good technician won’t even touch a computer unless they know the data is redundantly stored somewhere else. A solid backup is a critical part of any network. That said, there is backup… and then there is backup. Read on to see what I mean.

In uncertain times, one of the most important things for any business to do is to stay the course—albeit in an adjusted fashion. To help, we’ve put together a few key practices to work positively to achieve this end.