Business Continuity & Data Protection

Let’s face it, in today’s business world, data is king and protecting it is critical.  As a business owner, it can be argued that besides your staff and your clients your data is the next most valuable asset you possess.  However, many businesses treat their data and the protection of their data with a very cavalier attitude.  Listed below are some of the most important considerations for a small business owner to evaluate when protecting their data:

1. How long can your business afford to be down?  This is commonly called RTO (Recovery Time Objective).  It is the target amount of time you set for the recovery of your IT and business activities after a disaster strikes.  Savvy business owners understand how much each hour of downtime costs them.  It is imperative for all businesses to minimize downtime and be confident in the RTO they have selected.
2. What is your loss of data tolerance?  This is commonly called RPO (Recovery Point Objective).  It is a measure of how much data you can afford to lose.  This will drive how often you backup your data.  For example, if your RPO is one day of data, you must set your backups to run each day.

Backing up and protecting your business data is critical, but it is dwarfed by the most important factor; recovery of your data.  Businesses that simply assume their valuable data is properly backed up can be in for a rude awakening.  Your IT provider or support team must be able to demonstrate that data is properly backed up AND easily and quickly recoverable. 

The next piece that is critical to consider is what data and which servers should be backed up, and how quickly can the compromised files or servers be recovered.  It’s wonderful if data is backed up and available, but if it takes hours or days to recover from an incident, it truly isn’t a workable solution.  Even most smaller businesses today have multiple servers.  It’s imperative that business owners evaluate each business-critical server and how it will be backed up and recovered gracefully and in a timeframe that is acceptable to the business. 

At Connecting Point, we are experts in data protection and business continuity.  Let our professionals discuss your business needs and put together a plan that ensures your valuable data is properly protected and recoverable. 

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