Protecting Your Assets: It’s Not All Gloom and Doom

As an industry when we’re talking about protecting your digital assets by backing up your data we tend to focus on the worst that could happen, the time-tested, government approved Doom and Gloom Scenario. Why?

Because we want to get your attention, that’s all. It’s meant to grab your attention and get you to take us up on our “call to action.” Frankly it’s just not as urgent-sounding to say something like “an image-based hybrid cloud backup solution is the best mitigation strategy in the event your data is compromised by cyber-attack”.

See what I mean? That last line didn’t really grab you by the throat and make you want to click on something ASAP because you were in imminent danger.

Lets instead focus on the best way to develop a continuity plan for your business and digital assets.

The Reality Check: You Need to Protect You Business

This is the section of the blog where we need to talk: the reality is that your digital assets and business continuity are at risk, but it’s not all doom and gloom.

Make no mistake; a good disaster recovery solution DOES protect you from the Doom and Gloom Scenario. In fact, the disaster recover / business continuity (DR/BC) industry was created around that type of catastrophe, and that was a good thing.

Businesses of every size should be prepared to take appropriate action if they can’t walk in the front door tomorrow. A few years ago, FEMA published that within one year of a disaster 40% of businesses were no longer in business. Scary numbers to be sure, and my job is to make certain that your DR / BC solution secures your digital assets for all types of disasters.

Two Reasons to Back-Up Your Digital Assets

The two most common dangers our data faces today are server outage and cyber-attack. My last few entries have been talking about the dangers of ransomware and the hostage fees companies are paying because they were ill-prepared for an attack. That said, a server outage could be just as costly in terms of lost productivity and business data. Can your backup solution function as a temporary server?

Back-Up and Recovery Options

Remember when backups were basically a copy of our files to a tape drive? Sounds archaic now but back in the day it did the trick. Not anymore. Today’s hybrid local and cloud-based solutions can eliminate the risk of losing data or paying ransomware hostage fees!

The term I want you to remember is Recovery Time Objective (RTO). When building your DR / BC Plan one of the first steps is to define what your RTO should be. In other words, how long can you wait to get your data back. If the answer is two weeks then congratulations, you’re still in the 70’s and Peaches and Herb are on the radio. Most of us would answer with somewhere between 2 and 6 hours. Going a full business day without access to our billing and customer information would be costly. We may not lose business but we would surely have some extra costs associated with catching up!

Using our Data Care Off-Site (DCOS) solution our clients have experienced a full file server recovery in less than an hour. This outage was not a tornado or flood, but a cyber-attack.

Another success story involves a client whose server died. Instead of panic and frustration we booted their virtual servers on our backup server and they were up and running in around an hour.

It’s Time for a Plan

Can you answer confidently the following questions?

• My data is being backed up
• My data is being backed up at multiple locations?
• I know what is being backed up and how often?
• I know how long it will take to restore my data (Your RTO)?
• I know my IT partner will respond within 1 hour to help us restore our data?

If you aren’t confident that you have a plan in place and your DR / BC data backup solution can meet your business needs it’s time for a new approach.

I the meantime, remember: it’s not all Doom and Gloom.

CSI offers a complimentary Digital Asset Recovery Plan as part of our assessment. Just send us an Email or give us a Call.