Why do we need backups?
People are not infallible. They make mistakes and they make them quite often. Emails containing viruses are accidentally opened every day and important files are often mistakenly deleted. There’s no reason to fear these issues if you take frequent incremental snapshots of your systems. You can simply restore to a snapshot taken before the virus happened. Or you can recover the file from a time before it was deleted. It’s really easy to protect your company from the little things and there’s the added benefit of being ready for the big things as well.
Many, if not most businesses are required to keep business records for an extended period. This is either for tax purposes or because of various regulations. You might just need to look at what was going on a few years ago. It’s easy to assume that your computers have you covered just because they’ve got your last few years’ worth of information on them. But as you might know by now, having one copy is generally a huge mistake. Insuring that you’ve got an offsite backup of critical client information can really save you if something goes wrong locally. The IRS and regulatory commissions really don’t care that you had a data disaster. All it means to them is that you’re not compliant and they can fine you.
In the untimely event of a disaster, the first business to get back up and running will take all the business of those that aren’t back on their feet. As we’ll discuss in a moment, not having a plan can mean your doors close for good. Proper planning means that your doors stay open to those that worked with businesses that couldn’t survive data disaster.
A 2007 University of Texas study (source) showed that 43 percent of businesses that suffer major data loss never reopen. Many of these companies end up closing their doors for good within two years of a major data loss. And even large data loss scenarios aren’t always the result of a disaster. Human hands are very capable of destroying a business through silly mistakes or oversights. Don’t think Mother Nature is always responsible. Simply backing up data and having an effective backup and disaster recovery plan in place can help mitigate these types of threat. You can be one of the surviving businesses if you think ahead.
The first rule of doing work is “do it right the first time.” If you suffer a minor failure and don’t have backups, you may be able to recover certain things, but you never know what those “certain things” will be. In almost any case, you’ll have a boat-load of work to redo whether it’s setting systems up all over again or recreating spreadsheets you or your employees have been working on for months. Worse yet, if you suffer a major data loss, you could feasibly end up re-doing everything you’ve ever done—that’s a situation few companies survive.
How we do it
Servers
Regular backups are taken of the device in real-time with no loss of service. The backups can be of individual folders or files or the entire device. These backup files are then written to an external USB hard drive and replicated to the cloud or to another of your sites for full Disaster Recovery. All backup files are encrypted both locally and off site.
Each backup only copies changes since the last backup was taken, so are extremely fast and small in size. The interval between backups can be as low as 15 minutes.
The backups are then consolidated at the end of each month and can be kept indefinitely.
Desktops and Laptops
There are occasions where data is stored on users’ desktops or laptops. This is common in remote working scenarios.
Using our desktop and laptop backup solution we will backup all common file types to the cloud, so in the event of a device failure or accidental deletion we can recover the files for the user.
Whilst backup solution sound expensive, this is from as little as £1 per device per month.
Emails
A common misconception is that cloud email providers such as Microsoft O365 backup your emails. Whilst they offer basic protection for your data they actually advise you backup your data as they cannot be held liable for any data loss, as per their Service Agreement in section 6b (source)
Our email backup solutions helps prevent against any of these issues. Regardless of what device sends the email, the email will be backed up and can be easily restored. This solution links in nicely with our email archiving solution to ensure all emails are archived off into s secure, read-only ISO certified archiving system.
Office 365
Much like with emails, Microsoft provide basic protection but they advise you to backup your data as they cannot be held liable for any data loss, as per their Service Agreement in section 6b (source)
Our O365 backup solution is a cloud solution that connects to your O365 tenancy to backup selected data. This means that should anything happen to the data such as user error or something to the device that damages the data such as a virus or Malware, we can recover the data in a matter of minutes.