Don’t Let Hardware Failures Cripple Your Business
Traditionally, companies have preferred storing data on external hard drives and on-premise data centers, believing this is safer than trusting important business data to a third party. But what happens to your data when there is a hardware failure?
An unexpected hardware failure can wipe out all your business data and leave you stranded. And it is more common than you think.
• Hardware failure accounts for 42% of all data loss
• 40% of users lose data due to hardware and system malfunctions
• 93% of businesses that had data center outages for 10 days or more filed for bankruptcy within a year
What can an unexpected data loss do to your business?
Your data is the lifeline of your business. Loss of critical data can result in:
• Disruption of services
• Lost productivity
• Sales and marketing downtime
• Customer dissatisfaction
• Thousands of dollars spent to recreate lost data
Are small businesses more vulnerable?
Small businesses are more vulnerable as they mostly rely on on-premise hardware for data storage. In a survey of small and mid-sized businesses, 45% said their business had experienced data loss, with an average of $9000 in data recovery fees. 54% of them said the data loss was due to a hardware failure.
Small businesses often lack the budget, or the technical know-how, to invest in efficient data storage, backup and recovery systems. Also, the data they control may be too small in size to require a complex storage and disaster recovery service (DRaaS). Still, using no (or an inefficient) data backup method can severely jeopardize business data in case of a failure.
Use data backup to protect your business
• Take regular backups of your critical data and ensure the backed up data is stored at separate off-site locations. A government audit of the US postal service found it lost important data after a hardware failure erased both the data and its backup which, unfortunately, were stored together
• Schedule backups to run automatically at times when the system usage is low
• Test your backup and recovery processes regularly to ensure they are functioning correctly – 34% of businesses do not test their backups and of those that do, 77% have found a failure in their backup process
Choosing the right backup method
The backup process you use should complement the needs of your business. A poorly designed backup process may be prone to errors and inadequate for your business, apart from consuming valuable dollars without generating any returns.
It is important to analyze the volume and nature of your data and do a business impact analysis before deciding on a backup solution. Things to consider here are storage costs, recovery speeds and how much you expect your data to grow as your business expands.
Tape and disks have been traditionally used to backup data. While disk offers high recovery speed, tape is more reliable, less prone to errors and offers long term stability and data retention capacity.
A relatively modern alternative to both tape and disk is cloud backup. Cloud provides high uptime, high redundancy and scalability with pay-as-you-grow models, which allow you to consume more storage as your business grows. You can also avoid a lot of the capital expenses that come with a tape or disk based backup solution.
Think beyond the obvious
Today, a multitude of data backup, archival and restore solutions are available that use the latest in technology to provide an integrated backup and recovery solution with automatic failover in the event of a hardware failure. And what’s more, they can be customized to your unique needs.
The volume of lost data has increased by 400% over the last two years. Backing up your critical data can be the deciding factor of the success or failure of your business.
