A full 40% of businesses are not prepared for a disaster. That’s astonishing! Protecting your business from downtime due to unforeseen circumstances is as smart as buying insurance for your house or for your car. Disasters come in many shapes and sizes. Boiled down, 45% of disasters are a result of an operational failure, 35% can be attributed to nature, and 19% come from human error.
It doesn’t really even matter where the disaster comes from. The truth is that you have to deal with it. If your company doesn’t have a serious disaster recovery plan in place to secure your data and work product, then you will incur huge costs as a result of downtime. On average, a business suffers a hit of 18.5 hours of downtime when they face one of these failures. For a small company that adds up to about $7,000 per hour. While that sounds terrifying enough to the small business owner, that number goes up to an astonishing $700,000 per hour with a large enterprise. You can quickly see how costly downtime is, and why you, as the leader of your company, want to set up safeguards against it.
“Failover” is the term used for rolling a company’s data, work-product, and workflow over to another location when disaster strikes. With cloud-based failover disaster recovery, a company doesn’t have to miss a beat when the power goes out, when the computer network goes down, or when an employee spills his coffee into the mainframe. Hey, it’s happened before…
With a cloud-based failover system your company can continue to do business as usual while you scramble to deal with whatever Mother Nature throws your way. By having a disaster recovery strategy in place, you protect your company’s earnings and your employees’ paychecks from unforeseen circumstances.
Due to both local and global events, many of your competitors are planning to invest in disaster recovery systems this year. Others plan to upgrade the failover systems that they already have in place. Some of the failover upgrades that companies like yours are making now are to enable them to cover desktops and remote workers / offices in the event of a disaster. Having desktops and off-site computers backed up to the cloud and the work ready to be shifted to and utilized at a new location is key to a seamless response to disaster.
So, why should you as the owner of a small to medium sized business jump on the bandwagon of failover disaster recovery systems? Well, you should do it for the same reason that you buy insurance. It is a way to protect what is valuable. In the event of a power surge, flood, or fire your hardware will be easily replaced by your insurance, but what about all of that data? What about that file that you have worked on for the past two months? Disaster recovery systems that are cloud-based take the work and the worry out of backup and save you thousands in the event of unforeseen disastrous circumstances.
In the past few years leading businesses have seen these as the top reasons why they have invested in a failover cloud-based disaster recovery system:
- Reliability – No one wants to walk through six inches of water in their office wondering to themselves, “Did my employees get their work onto a thumb drive before it happened?” The reliability of disaster recovery systems gives peace of mind at a difficult time.
- Security – Yes, there are consumer-grade products out there for your employees to upload their work to the cloud, but security is the problem. Commercial, business-grade data recovery vendors (called IT Managed Service Provider) provide a high level of security that assures the discriminating business owner that his work-product and customer information is secure – even in the event of a disaster.
- Compatibility – A good IT Managed Service Provider will be able to put processes in place that are compatible with your existing hardware and software. They will take the time to understand your work flow and will suggest solutions that will mesh well with what you are already doing.
- Desktop Recovery / Remote Recovery – Today’s disaster recovery systems do much more than simply upload the company mainframe to the cloud once a day. A good IT MSP will be able to provide continuous backup of not only the company mainframe and servers but also the desktop computers and the computers of remote workers and offices.
- Ease of Use – Nobody needs an extra level of complication. When it comes to data backup and recovery, a cloud-based system provided by an IT Managed Service Provider will operate seamlessly and effortlessly. All of the hard work is done on the MSP’s end. The business owner can then rely on having his data available to him no matter what the circumstance.
Failover solutions are a necessity of modern business! Your business is not fully protected until you have invested in a true failover data recovery system. Disasters happen more often than we would like to think and planning ahead is the key to surviving them. Unfortunately, your business is not immune to operational, natural, and human error disasters, so it is up to you to be one step ahead of them by investing in and implementing a failover data recovery system.
Ready to learn more about how to implement a complete failover solution in your business? Reach out to Integris – we would be happy to talk with you and answer any and all of your questions. Get in touch with our team of dedicated IT professionals at (888) 330-8808 or [email protected] today.
