3 Statistics That Show How Important Your Data Backup System Is

3 Statistics That Show How Important Your Data Backup System Is

The fear of losing data fuels the data backup market, and with all the new threats that are constantly trying to find you on the Internet, every company has to have a strategy to protect their data.

A lot of small businesses struggle to recover if they don’t have proper continuity policies, including data backup, when there is a situation that causes them to lose data.

The fact is that a organization’s data is a critical component of its attempts to sustain operations after it’s hit with a disaster. Let’s look at three statistics that could relate to your business’ ability to protect its data.

Statistic #1: 20 Percent of All Small Businesses Will Be Hacked This Year

Some business owners think their business is too small to be hacked. This is wrong, and can put a company in great peril. In fact most businesses that get hacked suffer financial hardship, reputational demise, or worse. In fact, 60 percent of small businesses that have to deal with a major data loss incident, don’t last for long afterwards.

You may not be able to control when and how you are going to be hacked, but by taking proactive measures to make sure that your data is secure, if it were to be hit with some form of data loss, you won’t have to worry about running the risk of company failure.

Statistic #2: 20 Percent of All SMBs Will Suffer Major Data Loss Once Every Five Years

Data’s role for business is changing. It is now an essential variable of most businesses, and since it’s stored digitally, it is easier to manage, but also easier to lose. One-in-five businesses will deal with major data loss at some point, and by being prepared for it, you can put it behind you and move your business forward.

Statistic #3: Despite Having a Disaster Recovery Plan in Place, 33 Percent Are Unprepared

You get it, you think. You understand how important backup is and how it will bail you out of a tight spot. This is true, but there is much more to it than that.

You need to have a disaster recovery plan in place that has firm answers on what systems need to be restored first and how much data and time you can lose before your business is in trouble. Testing your backup solution is important, but knowing about your business is essential to a successful data recovery.

At WheelHouse IT, our knowledgeable professionals can not only set you up with the technology your organization needs to keep from being a statistic, they can help put you in an advantageous position by helping you plan the backup and recovery platform you would need to save your business.

For more information, call us today at (877) 771-2384.

How to Be Sure Your Business Continuity Plan is Complete

How to Be Sure Your Business Continuity Plan is Complete

While it may not be fun to consider the worst-case scenario, it is important that you have a plan to ensure that your business will be able to survive when the chips are down. This plan to ensure that your business will continue is called (appropriately enough) a business continuity plan, and needs to address a few things that we will go over here.

In order to really be effective, a business continuity plan needs to be comprehensive – otherwise, your operations will still be interrupted when you encounter a lack of some resource that you need access to. A complete plan will document the following considerations and the strategies for completing them:

Threat Matrix

The first thing your plan should address is the variety of threats it might face, from the mundane events that can be mitigated with relatively little effort to the catastrophic, do-or-die disasters that require in-depth planning and proactive activities to weather. This portion of your plan should acknowledge these threats and propose your company’s response to them.

Critical Processes

Every business has workflows, chains of command, and other processes that it requires to properly operate. Your business continuity plan needs to both identify and detail these processes so they are able to continue with minimal interruption.

Command Chain

Or in other words, who’s in charge. A hierarchy of authority is crucial to the continuation of the business as someone needs to be in command, and equally importantly, have it be common knowledge that they are in command to avoid grandstanding. Otherwise, nothing can or will be accomplished.

Employee Safety and Evacuation Plan

In order for business to continue, there has to be someone there to continue it. A business continuity plan needs to have a dedicated section that addresses how and when to evacuate employees to ensure their safety in a dangerous situation.

Communication Plan and Contact Information

Anyone associated with your company, from your employee to your clients to your business partners, needs to be kept in the loop throughout whatever scenario is in play. Your plan needs to address when, how, and why different contacts should be updated.

Backup Processes and Location

In order for your business continuity preparations to be complete, you should be maintaining a backup somewhere offsite – ideally in a cloud solution. Another piece of your plan should be dedicated to ensuring that this backup can be accessed. This also pertains to the possibility of identifying a backup location to turn to when your original offices are uninhabitable in order to resume at least some semblance of productivity.

Inventory and Infrastructure

There are a lot of pieces to the typical workplace infrastructure, including hardware and software. Therefore, you need to be sure that you can reliably identify the inventory and infrastructure you had for both insurance purposes and to acquire replacements.

End of Incident Criteria

Just like you need to know when something crosses the line over to “disaster,” you need to know when the disaster ends. Creating a list of conditions that must be met before reviewing the damage and beginning recovery will allow you to more efficiently begin the process, without jumping the gun and taking more damage.

Post-Incident Debriefing

Finally, when the dust has settled, you need to survey the damage and deliberate how things could have been handled better. Take the opportunity to review your business continuity strategy and make any changes and improvements. Your business continuity plan should also include a template to create a questionnaire to have your contacts fill out to give you the maximum amount of feedback and insight. This will allow you to make your plan better, in case of “next time.”

If you see to proactively considering, strategizing, and documenting these facets to your plan, you will have a much greater chance of a successful recovery. WheelHouse IT can assist you with the technological aspects of it. Give us a call at (877) 771-2384 for more information, or to get an evaluation of your current solutions.

Create A Solid Business Continuity Plan

Create A Solid Business Continuity Plan

Disaster always seems to hit us when we least expect it, which is why you need business continuity.

With the various disasters that continue to occur, this has proven to us that no business or organization can truly afford to think that an emergency will never have an impact on their livelihood and their business operations.

Business continuity planning has become a huge priority for many businesses. Many of the business continuity plans that are created do not have the proper tools and resources to ensure that their business operations will be able to continue even after a disaster strikes.

Outline Your Threats

When a business continuity plan is created, the business leaders have to start by evaluating their environment and carefully analyzing any potential risks they may face. We suggest that you create a full list of potential threats that your business can face.

Once you have carefully outlined the potential risks, we recommend that you place the risks in categories according to the equipment and systems that can be impacted.

When you consider all the possible problems you may face, your business will have a better opportunity to deal with the issues before anything actually occurs and before any damage is done.

Meet Your Business Standards

It can be very easy for a business to overlook this part of the process because there are various other things that will need to be completed. The standards that have been set by your industry will be a great template for your business continuity strategy.

Using your business’s industry standards as a framework will give you a better chance of passing any audits in the future. You will also have a greater chance of meeting on the compliance requirements that have been set for your industry.

Once you have created a business continuity strategy you think is good enough for your business, it is important that you remember to test the strategy. You cannot stop once you have created the strategy; it is essential that you make sure the strategy undergoes testing and revisions as needed.

You want to make sure your business operations can continue in the event of an emergency or a disaster. When your strategy works, this will mean that workers can work remotely and still access important business information.

Business continuity planning should be a top priority for your business.

Do you have the right proper systems in place?

Does your plan align with your business standards?

If you need to create a solid business continuity plan please do not hesitate to contact us today.

Is Your Business Ready for Investors to Take a Closer Look?

Is Your Business Ready for Investors to Take a Closer Look?

Investors rarely care about the nature of your business, they care if you’re business ready.

They might not even care about the long-term profitability of your business. What they want to know is how quickly they’re going to get their money back and what type of return they should be expecting.

In their search to find the hard answers, there are a few things that they look for. If you have these elements, they know you’re serious and your business is likely to be reliable.

If you don’t have them, each missing element is a red flag.

Do you have data backup?

Every business runs on data, regardless of the niche or services, customer contact information, audit records, employee data, and license specs. The more data you have, and the more you can do with the data, the better your business will consistently run.

But investors want to know what you’ll do if part of that data ever gets corrupted or disappears. If part of the profit evaporates with it, then your business isn’t safe. So make sure your data is backed up on either a dedicated server or the cloud.

Many businesses streamline their backups by having intermittent recovery points, when all of the information in the system is downloaded as it is, as well as daily storage that captures smaller changes in in-progress work.

Multiple recovery points help mitigate common corruption errors that slowly degrade data over time because of computer glitches that can’t be caught.

Do you have business continuity and disaster recovery plans?

These are two different plans. One is about how you plan on having business operations continue in the middle of an emergency or major malfunction, while the other details how you’re going to get all the systems and data back to peak performance again.

If you don’t have these plans, investors will think you’re not prepared for problems. Make sure you have plans that are detailed enough that any employee can open the plan and know exactly what to do.

If you want to make your network stronger and your business ready for investors contact us.