5 Reasons why you need backup and a disaster recovery strategy

5 Reasons why you need backup and a disaster recovery strategy

While almost every business leader appreciates the importance of backing up data, there remains a common confusion between backup and disaster recovery. Simply keeping a copy of everything on a redundant server or a storage network hosted in-house is not enough. You also need to think about the tools and procedures needed to enable the swift recovery of lost applications and data. After all, every moment of unscheduled downtime costs money.

#1. Cyberthreats are plentiful and constantly evolving

Ever since digital technology became standard in the enterprise environment, cyberattacks have been growing in number and kind every year. Organizations face a constant battle against increasingly innovative cybercriminals, and data loss and security breaches are getting costlier. There has been unprecedented growth particularly in ransomware for the past couple of years, with many large enterprises losing their data to extortion schemes, as well as countless smaller assaults. If your business suffers a ransomware attack, then having a complete and easily recoverable backup of your systems and data saves you from being at the mercy of cybercriminals.

#2. Economic losses are increasing every year

Data loss, whether accidental or due to malicious activity, is getting costlier. In fact, just an hour of unplanned downtime can cost even a small business thousands of dollars. That’s where disaster-recovery plays a crucial role in any remediation strategy. While you obviously need to have a recent backup of your data to restore in the first place, the recovery procedures you have in place are instrumental in keeping disruptions to an acceptable minimum. Too many businesses spend too much time and effort retrieving data from systems that are ill-prepared for a quick recovery.

#3. Your brand reputation is at stake

It’s difficult to quantify the consequences of data loss since there are many indirect costs to consider. One of these is the damage to your brand’s reputation. When your employees are left unable to carry out their daily routines or service the demands of your customers, it won’t be long before your brand starts to suffer. These days, consumers and business customers expect immediate gratification and complete reliability. They’re not interested in hearing excuses why your computer system failed. For extended periods of unscheduled downtime, the adverse effects increase quickly and exponentially.

#4. Attack surfaces and points of failure are expanding

Last year, Atlanta suffered a ransomware attack that brought the municipal government to its knees. The disaster cost the state $2.6 million in remediation, and 8,000 employees were told not to turn on their computers until five days after the attack. This incident reflects how unprepared organizations still are despite the looming threats. That’s the perfect environment for malware to spread quickly and bring wide-scale disaster in just minutes. Furthermore, the rise of cloud services and mobile devices has expanded attack surfaces enormously, which is why it’s now important to have a centralized backup and a disaster recovery strategy that lies outside of the conventional IT infrastructure.

#5. Digital transformation is the way of the future

As organizations across all industries adopt new technologies, not having a backup and disaster recovery strategy is simply not an option. In fact, disaster recovery and cybersecurity should be built in from the start; your computing systems should be secure by design. Backup and security aren’t things that should be tacked on later; they should be central to your entire IT strategy. If that’s not the case, it won’t be long before your organization suffers catastrophic data loss.

Everything irreplaceable should be backed up. This includes databases, virtualized computing resources, endpoint data, enterprise applications, and user accounts. You’ll need to determine how much data you can afford to lose, and how much downtime your company can bear before resulting in unacceptable losses. These are your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO), respectively; they are the two most important parameters in any digital risk management strategy.

Hudson Valley IT Services LLC helps businesses stay ahead of the competition with reliable security and risk management solutions. Call us today, and find out how.

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