Review Your Data Backup and Disaster Recovery Strategy for 2023

When a disaster strikes your business and your important data is compromised, can your business recover? Can it recover quick enough for it to not be irreparably damaged? Could you even conduct business without the lost data? How much downtime can your business even take? 

These questions and many more have to be addressed in any business continuity plan. If they are going to be successful, today’s business has to have a proactive plan in place that takes into account all types of situations that could conceivably cause downtime. Regardless of what other contingencies have to be made to make a comprehensive continuity plan, a business needs a strong data backup program.

Backing up your data—and, doing it in a way where you have access to it should something happen to your physical IT infrastructure—is only one part of a comprehensive business continuity strategy, but an essential one. Without a backup to rely on should you need to restore your data, the right (or wrong) form of disaster could easily render your entire continuity strategy worthless. 

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Business continuity and disaster recovery are similar as they cover two sides of the same issue. They both cover the before-and-after of business interruption. While business continuity covers the actual administration of the entire business, disaster recovery is specific for recovering from disasters; or more specifically situations that stop a business from operation. In this way, disaster recovery is a part of a comprehensive business continuity plan.

Disaster recovery starts with data backup. Typically, most businesses need to get their data and applications up and running fast. Some businesses can be down longer than others, but when determining your disaster recovery strategy, you need to understand everything about your backup situation so that it can support your business’ recovery needs.

What to Look For

A decent backup strategy should do more than just store copies of your company's files. It needs to be accessible regardless of your business’ current situation and it needs to be fast to restore from. Not all “disasters” are a business ruiner, they can be situations like malware infecting the underlying systems or even user error, and require quick access to backed up files.

More than that, you will want your backup solution to be stored in multiple places. SCW offers a BDR service that backs up data in house and in the cloud for use in any type of situation. More than that, our solution features bare metal restore, which gives you the option to restore your data to completely clean hardware. You can back up your data and applications and move them over. What’s more, your backup can also function like a temporary server, so that you can work while getting new hardware in place. 

Ultimately, it’s your choice on how to handle your backup, your disaster recovery, and your business continuity planning. At SCW, we have the experienced technicians that can help you plan your organization’s continuity plan, while providing the IT needed to ensure that you can get up and running quickly when something terrible happens. Give us a call today at (509) 534-1530 to learn more.