Twelve months, four seasons, and infinite chances for things to go wrong for your business. Engage in BDR all year long to ensure that your company can bounce back if they do!
The Perennial Need for BDR
In the summer, when the days are long and the weather warm, sunburn should be our biggest worry. Unfortunately, there is a huge discrepancy between how things should be and how they are. For instance, business owners should always backup files so information lost in an unforeseen event can be recovered. Yet too often, business owners’ commitment to disaster recovery melts away with the snow beneath the summer sun. We at Slice urge clients not to put their dedication to preserving data in storage with their winter coat when the weather heats up.
Disaster’s Many Forms and Unpredictable Timing
Business owners’ tendency to neglect data and backup disaster recovery (BDR) in the summer months seems to stem from the misguided belief that most data loss is due to disasters of the natural variety and that these disasters only strike in the winter. This belief is flawed for several reasons. First, while natural disasters are a bona fide threat to businesses, they only account for 10% of data unavailability, or downtime. In fact, the majority of this costly period of idleness is the result of year-round risks like human error and fires. This mindset also overlooks a more deliberate year-round threat to data; hackers. Published reports indicate that businesses are the targets of more than half of all hacking attacks. Finally, even if natural disasters were the leading cause of business setbacks, their occurrence is not limited to winter. Winter may have the worse reputation, but summer comes with its own set of hazards. Summer brings heat waves which can lead to power outages as easily as winter snowstorms can. Summer hurricanes mean rain that can flood businesses and wind that can send trees toppling into office buildings, damaging the equipment inside. Business owners cannot predict when disaster will strike, but they can control how quickly their company recovers when it does.
The Importance of BDR
Though every business has its unique BDR needs, BDR typically involves processes like planning and testing a system’s responses to different kinds of failures and configuring the database environment for backup and recovery. When basking in the summer sun, it isn’t fun, or even natural to concern yourself with BDR, but in the event of a data loss, you will be glad you did. IT experts estimate that businesses lose approximately $585,892 annually trying to recover from downtime and data loss. According to the United States Bureau of Labor, 93% of companies that experience a data disaster close within 5 years and the odds are even worse for businesses that fail to retrieve lost information within one month. Make sure losing data doesn’t mean losing everything. Regularly engage in BDR and guarantee that information critical to the survival of your business can be quickly and easily accessed in a data emergency.
Your company’s data is threatened year-round by everything from human nature to Mother Nature. When the threat level is high and so are the stakes, it is wise to take every precaution. This summer, don’t take a vacation from BDR!