PCSOFT Blog

One of the most important technologies for any business is their data backup solution. Most companies cannot survive without their data. Is your data protected in the event of a disaster? How is your organization approaching this critical IT operation?

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If you’re not backing up your data, then you’re rolling the dice with your company’s future. It’s only a matter of time before disaster strikes, whether it is a natural disaster causing physical damage to your office, hardware failure like a hard drive crash, a hack attack, malware, or any other of the many threats lurking on the Internet. As a business owner, you are well aware that you can’t get ahead without taking risks. However, nothing is to be gained by risking the integrity of your data.

Therefore, having any backup solution is better than having nothing at all; albeit, once you start shopping for a data backup solution for your company, you’ll quickly realize that you’ve got many options before you, and not all data backup solutions should be considered equal. Due to data backup being such a crucial component of your company’s operations, you want to go with your best option, which we feel is a Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution.

The alternative option is to go with a tape backup solution. Tape backup has been used by organizations to backup their data since the dawn of the computer age. To be fair, backing up with tape is reliable, but its usefulness has been far surpassed by BDR, thanks to BDR’s utilization of the cloud and its ultra-quick data recovery times. Additionally, the biggest selling point of tape backup has always been its price, but with cloud computing becoming more affordable than ever before, in several cases, tape backup no longer holds this advantage.

Perhaps the biggest advantage BDR has over tape backup is the fact that it’s an entirely automated, hands-off process. Compare this to backing up with tape where an employee must manually swap out full tapes for blank tapes, every day, as well as find a safe place to physically store them, which is often susceptible the same natural disasters as the rest of your office. In order to avoid downtime, this process is often done after hours, which makes it a rather resource-intensive task. Lastly, restoring from a tape is a cumbersome process. Depending on how much data your business requires, it could take anywhere from hours to days to complete the data restoration process.

Backing up with BDR is far superior. Take into consideration these three benefits that appeal to any continuity-minded business owner.

• Multiple backups per day: Instead of doing one big data backup at the end of the day, BDR takes multiple snapshots of your company’s data all throughout the workday. In many cases, these snapshots take place as often as every fifteen minutes. Given the fast pace of today’s business world, you know just how much your organization would be set back if even a couple of hours worth of data were to be unexpectedly erased.
• Rapid recovery speed: BDR takes advantage of the cloud. This makes recovering backed up data a breeze. Compared to tape backup where old tapes must first be manually retrieved and then restored (a process that could take hours), recovering your data with BDR is as easy as finding a working Internet connection (a process that can take mere minutes).
• A temporary server: In the event that a disaster takes out a server, your BDR solution can temporarily take its place while a solution is found (like waiting for a replacement part to be shipped), making it so that your business doesn’t skip a beat. Tape backup can’t come close to offering your business this kind of continuity.

To take full advantage of backing up your data with your very own BDR solution, give PCSOFT a call at 02 98730080.

Your business’s data backup solution is an absolutely integral part of your day-to-day operations, and as such, it’s your responsibility to ensure that you’re regularly taking backups of your data. By far, the most efficient way of doing so is through the utilization of image-based backup. Image-based backup works like how we use cameras and smartphones to capture moments in time, effectively making a record of your data at any given moment.

When was the last time you put some serious thought into your data backup and disaster recovery strategy? Can your business handle a sudden loss of data, and if so, how long would it take your organization to recover and get back in the swing of things? While there are several ways you can approach the concept of data backup, only one of them will be the best choice for your business. So, how do you go about making such an important decision?

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One way you can make sure you’re approaching backup and disaster recovery in an educated fashion is by understanding what causes even the best equipment to fail and what your options are in regards to instituting a comprehensive data backup and recovery solution. Here are four often-overlooked concepts of backup and disaster recovery that absolutely need to be considered to facilitate the proper continuity of your business.

What Does Your Current Backup Situation Look Like?
Naturally, the first step toward improving your backup and disaster recovery practices is to consider your current system. Do you have one? If not, why? Your business shouldn’t move forward with the assumption that nothing bad will ever happen to your data. It’s not a question of if your data will be destroyed or compromised; rather, it’s when it will be. Even the most cautious organization will run into situations, like natural disasters, hacking attacks, or even user error, where their data becomes lost and needs to be recovered. This is why it’s important to always have a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery plan.

How Often Do You Test Your Backups?
Even if you have a backup system in place, how often do you test your backups to make sure they will work properly when you need them most? It’s not unheard of for a business to lose everything in a fire, and when attempting a recovery, they find out that the entire backup is corrupted or doesn’t work properly. You shouldn’t just be hoping that your backups will work fine. You need to guarantee that they will. It’s your business’s future on the line, so you owe it to yourself to make sure your organization won’t fail due to negligence.

Is There a Single Point of Failure?
Many complex systems stem from a specific source, and if that source is destroyed, the complex system collapses under the sheer weight of its infrastructure. Is your business at risk of this happening? In other words, do you have multiple ways to access information, or is it all located in one central hub that is at a high risk? Your IT infrastructure shouldn’t be brought down by the failure of a single server. This is why it’s recommended that you take advantage of both cloud technology and virtualization services to always be ready for the worst-case scenario.

Is Your Technology Placed in Vulnerable Locations?
It doesn’t take much to destroy a piece of technology under the right conditions. All it takes is a flood or a power surge to fry a server unit or workstation. If your organization is located in an area known for fierce storms, hurricanes, or even simple rainfall, you should make every effort to elevate your technology. Similarly, you don’t want to overload your electrical circuits and cause a power outage. One way to remediate this is with an Uninterrupted Power Supply, or a UPS. This makes sure that your servers and workstations are properly shut down following a loss of power, helping to minimize data loss.

One of the best ways to protect your data and IT systems is to contact PCSOFT and ask about our Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution. We can equip your business with the tools necessary to ensure minimal data loss. Our BDR solution is designed to keep your business operating, even under the worst circumstances. It can even act as a server in the event of a hardware failure or similar loss. Give us a call at 02 98730080 to learn more.