Data Recovery Digest

If your business loses data, then you need to be able to bring everything back up as quickly as possible. Having a strong disaster recovery plan in place may not lower the risk of data loss, but it can certainly lower the impact of it. And that impact not only reaches the company itself, but also its employees and customers.

Many are aware of the impact data loss can have, but there are still businesses out there who think disaster recovery is something that can skimp or save money on. IT leaders need to push its importance – sure, investing in disaster recovery may seem like insurance, but ask any company who has ever had data loss and they’ll tell you it’s worth it tenfold.

As such, let’s take a look at some dangerous misconceptions that businesses have about data recovery plans and disprove them.

1. It costs too much

Obviously, a disaster recovery plan isn’t going to come free. It does cost and can total a fair amount, especially if your business has a lot of data that it needs to backup. Redundancy is important too, meaning you need to have secondary copies at least of everything you’re backing up. However, this doesn’t mean your costs have to increase exponentially. Consider using cloud-based disaster recovery, which enables virtual machines to fail to secure cloud locations and lets you pay for only what you need.

2. Downtime has little impact

Even if you’re down for a few minutes, that can still have a huge impact. Some businesses will argue that because their systems aren’t customer-facing, they can handle a bit of downtime. But this is short-sighted. Customers expect everything instantly and services having outages can make people question their confidence in your business. Opinion Matters conducted a survey in 2016 and found that 69 percent of respondents believed a few minutes of downtime would have catastrophic business impact.

3. Outages don’t happen to us

This is usually peddled by those who don’t have extended outages, but instead suffer from regular short bursts of downtime. But this is just as bad because those periods of downtime quickly add up, resulting in days or weeks of total outage across the year. These are often not properly led back to senior leaders, creating false confidence in disaster recovery plans that might not be warranted.

4. A single backup is enough

Having an onsite backup is a good start, but it’s certainly not enough. For example, if a natural disaster strikes then both sets of your data are likely to be taken out, leaving you with nothing. However, disaster recovery doesn’t just refer to those that happen naturally – it also refers to recovery from human error or purposeful attacks. Then there’s power outages or upgrade problems that might be outside the IT team’s controls. Have an onsite backup as a starting point, but this shouldn’t be all that you use. For extra support, consider using a disaster recovery as a service to ensure that you are recovered quickly and fully protected.