One of the biggest problems facing businesses today is the fact that they are operating without a business continuity plan in place. What will you do if your business is suddenly unavailable due to a natural disaster?
Many small businesses haven’t thought that far ahead, putting their valuable resources at risk. What can you do to mitigate this risk? The best action your business can take today is to be proactive and plan for the inevitable.
It may seem like money wasted if a disaster never happens, however, if it does, you’ll be thankful that your business was well prepared. Natural disasters aren’t the only types of disasters your business might encounter, your business could be a victim of:
- Cyber Attacks
- Physical Security Breaches
- Inside Jobs
- Unexpected Downtime
If you host your servers on site, you can access your data in the event of a total loss. You could have tapes stored off site and those will likely take a while to backup onto the new hardware you must acquire.
Having a DR Plan is Essential for Small Businesses
If you have a disaster recovery plan, you’ll know exactly what to do when your business is completely inaccessible. You’ll be able to go your plan B, because you’ve practiced your plan B and you know that your plan B works. That’s the confidence you need in order to build your business knowing that you’ll have a backup plan should the worst possible circumstances arise.
How to Plan for a Disaster
One of the biggest problems with traditional data center backup jobs is the fact that it will take some time to bring up an infrastructure from scratch. That’s why many organizations will colocate servers in order to have either cold spares or warm standbys on demand.
This isn’t always cost effective, but some organizations need that type of assurance in order to build a network that they feel is resilient enough for their operations. More cost effective solutions could include cloud, which allows organizations to use infrastructure and pay for it only while the virtual machines are powered on.
Colo and Cloud Makes Good Business Sense
Whether you go colo or cloud, both options are terrific methods to getting backup protection for your organization. Keeping your business operating is the most important aspect of your company. When you have backup infrastructure ready to run your workloads, you will simply need to edit the network settings to give your end users the ability to connect to your services.
Rethink your backup and business continuity strategy with colocated and cloud hosted services.
