The Backup Systems Your Business Needs To Survive and Thrive
How much do you have to lose with your business in its current state? If some essential pillar of your company goes down, what do you do? Do you have backups in place? Is there anything that you can permanently lose because of events outside of your control? These are very important questions to ask because the risk of not having a backup can lead to financial distress, bankruptcy, and even total failure.
So what types of backup systems need to be in place for your business to survive and even thrive? First of all, a lot of companies can’t function without electricity. That means you need to have backup generators in place. Second, anything that you have on hard drives needs to be backed up. If you have financial data, sensitive data, information about company products that need to be protected – and all of those cases, having even two or three backups in other places is critical.
And lastly, if you have any information in the cloud, you need to make sure it has a backup somewhere. If one cloud service goes down with your necessary business information, you have to be able to find it somewhere else.
Generators
When the power goes out, what happens to your company? Do you have a generator in place? If not, how much money are you losing by your computer systems not functioning? You can find out how much cash is draining out of your account per hour when the electricity is off with a few basic equations. Compare that number with what it would cost to have an automatic generator system in place, and you understand why it’s such a good failsafe.
Hard Drive Backups
There’s a saying that goes if you don’t have something three places, then it’s nowhere at all. This, in particular, suggests that crucial data on hard drives needs to be backed up in at least two other places than its primary location. It is a business necessity because the first time that you lose a client because of a hard drive went bad, and you had no backup for that information, you will realize the pain you have just caused yourself.
Cloud Data
You might think that your data is safe if you save it in the cloud. However, this is not necessarily the case. What happens if you can’t get online to access your information that is necessary for your company’s professional needs? What happens if the central server goes down at the company location that you are using the cloud service of? Even when data is in the cloud, you should keep a hard backup of it one place and a soft backup of it somewhere else.
