A Look At Business Continuity

Imagine the worst-case scenario – over the weekend you are alerted that an electrical fault has caused a fire at your office. Part the office has been destroyed and the remaining areas have suffered smoke and water damage. Your computers, servers and other hardware are unusable. Could your business continue?

A business continuity plan to ensure your business can operate in case disaster strikes is just as essential for small businesses as it is for larger companies.

The Difference Between Business Continuity and Data Backup

Data backup answers the questions: is my data safe? Can I get it back in case of a failure?

Business continuity, on the other hand, involves thinking about your business at a higher-level and asks: how quickly can I get my business operating again in case of system failure?

Thinking about data backup is a good first step. Business continuity is equally important to consider to ensure your business can get back up and running in a timely manner.

What’s the Best Backup Solution?

There are two well-known types of data backup solutions: file – and image-based.

A file-based backup does exactly as it reads: you choose which files you want to back up, and those files are saved, to an on-site device or to the cloud, whichever type of solution you have chosen. But only the files you choose are saved. What if you forget to save a key file?

Image-based backup, on the other hand, captures an image of your data in its environment. Therefore, you have exact replications of what is stored on a server – including the operating system, configurations, settings, and preferences.

If a server goes down, you can restore it in minutes, rather than the hours or days it would take to requisition a new server and install and configure the operating system.

Key Considerations

Some key things we ask our clients to consider for any business continuity solution:

• Hybrid cloud backup—A hybrid approach fixes the vulnerabilities of relying on just a local or cloud-only backup
• Business continuity – Consider your whole business rather than simply backing up data, and calculate how much downtime your business can endure and still survive as well as how much data you can afford to lose
• Image-based backup—Make sure that your backup solution takes images of all data and systems rather than simply copying files

Check out this free, easy-to-use guide online RTO Calculator which was prepared by Datto – one of our cybersecurity partners – to see how well your business could survive an IT disaster.