IT Disaster Recovery – Is your business prepared for failure?
November 24, 2011
It seems many businesses are failing to appreciate the importance of their IT systems and, more specifically, the need to protect important business data.A recent report commissioned by EMC highlights the need for businesses to focus more on backup and recovery for their critical IT systems.
A staggering 74% of businesses were NOT confident “they can fully recover systems/data today”.
And 25% of businesses admitted to losing and average of 400GB worth of data.
The top 3 consequences of losing this data was:
- Loss of employee productivity (33%)
- Loss of revenue (29%)
- Loss of customer confidence/loyalty (26%)
74% of businesses were NOT confident “they can fully recover systems/data today”.
One way or another, these top three reasons all constituent to losing money. If you are running a business you are potentially throwing money away rather than investing in the survival and growth of the business.
It will never happen to me
With advances in technical reliability it is very easy to forget that things can fail; but believe me they do.
47% of businesses suffered from some form of IT systems downtime in the last 12 months. The top three reasons being:
- Hardware failure – 53% of businesses suffered some form of hardware failure
- Data corruption – 36% lost data through corruption, typically caused by the disk file system or application errors.
- Loss of power – 30% lost access to data because of power failure.
Why is this important
Like it or not as successful business people we are wholly dependant upon reliable IT systems be they internal or external to the organisation.
In recent months we have visited a number of new clients and some have been rather blasé about data loss. If you think that you’ll be OK in a disaster recovery or business continuity situation then I recommend you turn off your IT systems, including email, and see how you’d manage to run the business. I strongly suspect you would soon realise how important your data, or more specifically access to your data, is.
What can be done
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity are important considerations if you want to run a successful business.
Begin by:
- Identify and protect important data – work out what systems and data you need at minimum to run your business. The create a plan that deals with backing up data, including off site storage.
- Put contingencies in place – if you can’t access the data, how else could you perform the same task.
- Get the right people involved – whilst your mates brother who “works in IT” may be cost effective for startups, when the business grows the IT support structure must grow inline.
- Educate your workforce – ensure those around are fully aware of the business processes that need executing in the event of a failure.
These simple rules will start you on the right path to protecting you data and more importantly your business.
About Us
At N2N we focus on Small to Medium sized businesses and bring our Enterprise experience so can help provide the right solution at the right price.
So if you need any advice real free to contact us.
