World Backup Day, observed on March 31st annually, serves as a designated occasion to underscore the critical importance of regular data backups for ensuring data continuity. Although this day effectively highlights a fundamental best practice, we firmly advocate for a continuous commitment to maintaining and safeguarding backups rather than confining such awareness to a single day.

In business, there are always issues that need to be met. Often, there are so many that finding which ones to give priority is a chore all in itself. Choosing the best path forward depends on the situation, so when you are considering your organization’s disaster recovery you have to take into account every troubling situation your business can encounter. This month let’s go through some of the most prevalent disasters that a business can face. 

A disaster can take many forms, from a raging snowstorm to deleting the wrong file. Regardless of what kind of disaster you face, you can know that it doesn’t take much to impact a business, especially if the business doesn’t have a business continuity plan in place. How does your business recover from such a devastating scenario? How can it get its data back and in proper working order? That’s what we want to tell you about today.

A Little Background 

One of the biggest risks a business owner needs to address is what needs to happen if there is a situation where their business is disrupted. There has to be a series of actions taken that will allow for a thorough assessment of the situation and a return to productivity. These tasks don’t just solve the problems surrounding an issue, they are a strategy to ensure operational resilience.

A BCP is a plan that will be enacted in any situation that causes the business’ operation to be interrupted. This could be as simple as a deleted file, but it could also be enacted in situations where the health of the business is in grave danger. Having a comprehensive BCP in place helps eliminate the confusion that could further hurt your business when the going gets rough. 

As more and more people are dealing with the virus and its effects on commerce, supply chains are failing and distribution patterns are completely disrupted. This has had a devastating effect on the world economy. It isn’t like a hurricane or a flood, but an outbreak, like most other disasters, hit business’ suddenly and has led many to enact their disaster recovery strategies. Today, we are going to discuss how IT fits into disaster recovery. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly thrown us all for a loop, with many businesses wisely choosing to close their office doors, either scaling back their operations or choosing to utilize a more mobile workforce. While this clearly qualifies as a disaster, it isn’t one that holds too many risks against your data; at least, not when compared to some others. This gives us a chance to consider how well-prepared we are for other disasters that could pose more of a threat to the information and files your operations depend on. For instance, how would you respond if something were to happen to your actual business infrastructure (and, by association, any data you had stored there)?

We talk about Business Continuity a lot. Usually when we discuss it, we’re talking about backing up your data or having a plan in place to bounce back after a major disaster were to happen.

For example, if a fire were to take out your server room, what steps have you taken to prepare for it, and how quickly can you be back up and running?

The answer should be something like this:
We have our data backed up to an internal device in the server room. We can always rely on that, provided that the backup device remains operational. In the event that the backup device suffers from the disaster, we also back up our data in the cloud. The restore is a little more complicated, but we can manage for a few days from the cloud-based backup while new infrastructure is installed onsite.

That’s a really solid answer, and that is something that we specialize in helping British Columbia businesses achieve. However, that’s your backup strategy. That’s just a small part of your overall business continuity. That data backup is a real lifesaver when it comes to a physical disaster, but what happens when the disaster is a loss of life, or incapacitation, or even just a key individual suddenly walking out the door?

Let’s Look at a Scenario

Let’s say Bob is the business owner. He makes all of the decisions, he signs the contracts, he pays the bills. If Bob gets sick or suffers a stroke and becomes incapacitated, who takes over until he recovers? If Bob’s son works for the company, does the son have legal authority to take over?

We’re covering a lot of ground here, but technically, only the courts can intercede and make these types of decisions if it isn’t properly prepared for. You might run into a scenario where the court will choose someone to run the business temporarily while it is decided what to do next. This process can be slow, and the outcome might not be ideal.

If Bob establishes an Estate Plan, he can pick a successor to have legal authority to run the business. The Estate Plan should include a Revocable Living Trust and Powers of Attorney.

Let’s take a moment here to admit that we are not lawyers, and not offering professional legal advice, and that you should consult your lawyer before making any legal decisions. 

On top of all of this, you’ll want the family of the incapacitated business owner to maintain its lifestyle while keeping the business chugging along.

Business Continuity is About Smooth Recovery

Just like how we always recommend a backup device that can restore data quickly without a lot of overhead, the rest of your business continuity plan should cover a broad enough range of emergencies to enable the business to stay afloat during the toughest tides.

That plan should include taking a significant person or role out of the loop and continuing to operate normally. That may require thorough documentation and training for other capable employees before something bad happens.

Does your business continuity plan, or Emergency Action Plan (EAP) clearly cover this? If you would like to have a deeper conversation about business continuity, please reach out to us at Coleman Technologies to set up a call.

While not all of your data may be equally valuable, data loss is a bad thing across the board. This is precisely why Coleman Technologies offers comprehensive data backup and disaster recovery solutions.

Backing up your data allows you to sidestep the potential catastrophes that would come with the loss of your most critical information. Here, we’ll review a few situations that could put this data at risk to demonstrate how crucial having a backup really is.

Situation: Actual Disaster Event

Just about every business on Earth could potentially be impacted by some kind of weather event. Some deal with hurricanes, some deal with high winds and tornadoes, others with earthquakes and floods… you get the picture. Unfortunately, whichever one impacts your business, there isn’t very much you can do in the moment - which is why it is important to prepare now, so you can reopen again after the fact. Many don’t prepare, and therefore, don’t reopen.

Acting proactively and maintaining a backup allows you to more quickly bounce back after disaster has struck, allowing your business a second chance.

Situation: Data Corruption or Theft

Cybersecurity is a huge topic today, as there are many, many threats out there designed to target businesses. Take ransomware, for example: all it takes for you to lose access to your files is for an employee to click on the wrong thing. Not good.

However, using a BDR (in conjunction with a comprehensive business continuity plan) to keep your files safely backed up enables you to quickly restore data from an onsite backup copy of your data, while keeping another copy offsite for redundant protections and simplified migrations. This keeps you safe from a variety of threats, including ransomware and many other forms of malware. 

Situation: The Classic Office “Whoops!” Moment

The BDR is supremely useful in that it gives you an on-demand resource to pull your data from, on demand, as it is needed. This is particularly handy if a team is collaborating on a project, and somebody accidentally deletes something absolutely critical to the project. With a backup, your progress won’t be lost to bad luck.

A BDR allows you to breathe a little easier about your files and their security. To find out about adopting one for your business, reach out to Coleman Technologies today. Call (604) 513-9428 to get started.

Imagine, for a moment, just how much you have to lose from a data loss incident. Your business depends on its data, and if it suddenly loses access to it, you could be in a position where downtime significantly impacts your bottom line. In situations like this, you have no time to waste. You have to get back in the game as soon as possible or you risk losing so much traction that it could be hard to keep the doors open.

With this in mind, you can’t possibly achieve this goal without data backup. You have to think of it in terms of a potential loss incident--essentially it is professional risk management. While it’s true you don’t want to make decisions based solely on the what-ifs, it’s hard not to justify it in this case. What it boils down to is this: if you don’t have data backup and suffer from a disaster, your business will, more likely than not, fail. Therefore, the best way to ensure the possibility of success is to implement data backup and prevent a potential loss incident from surfacing in the first place.

Basically, the sheer fact that you know you need to back up your data is enough to justify having a solid backup solution.

The point that we are trying to make is that we shouldn’t have to convince you to go all-in on your business’ data backup and disaster recovery solution. It should be common sense. After all, you’re trying to preserve your business and its future against the possibility that a disaster scenario cuts its life short. You have no reason not to invest in something that could potentially save your business. It doesn’t matter whether it’s from a natural disaster, user error, or hardware failure--there is always the chance that an unforeseen event could spell the end of your organization.

The right data backup solution can go a long way toward keeping your business afloat, even in a worst-case scenario. To find out more about BDR, reach out to Coleman Technologies at (604) 513-9428.

Data Value in Business
The first thing that you need to know is that losing data is a very big deal. In fact, there is an entire field of study created to deal with this very issue. Called infonomics, this can put a dollar value on an organization’s data. While some organizations continuously deny that data has a tangible value, it is becoming more evident than ever that those organizations (typically insurance and accounting) have a vested interest in data’s value remaining intangible. Every other business can be sure that their data has monetary value.

With the acknowledgement that the analysis of organizational data can help businesses run a more efficient and profitable business, any standard enacted to properly evaluate this asset would be made to promote a strategy of organization-wide data security. If you need to justify spending capital on a data protection and redundancy strategy, you should be able to ascertain what the actual value your data has to your organization. A few ways you can value data include:

• How much capital would it cost to replace lost data?
• How much revenue is dependent on that data?
• How much money could you make by selling or renting the data you have?
• How much capital will you have to spend to protect this data?

However, you look at your organization’s data, it is an asset, and as those assets are compromised on your network, or removed from your network, you need to have a solution in place to get that data back.

Data Backup
The first step in any data recovery strategy is data backup. At Coleman Technologies, we believe that the best data backup strategy is to promote redundancy. In order to do so we promote a strategy that backs up data locally AND offsite. This presents options to make data recovery more efficient.

Our BDR service initially backs up your entire network. Since backing up an entire network will take a long time, and any downtime is extraordinarily costly, setting up a backup solution that protects the data you need without taking down the network at all, is important. Our BDR keeps data redundant on multiple hard drives and provides an organization with the much-desired data security it is looking for from a comprehensive solution.

Disaster Recovery
The first thing that has to be said is that the best data recovery strategy is one that never has to be used. However, data loss disasters can (and do) happen, leaving your business to pick up the pieces. The best way to do this is to have a dedicated disaster recovery platform in place that takes two crucial factors into account:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - The interval of time that might pass during a disruption before the amount of data lost exceeds the maximum threshold that your business can weather.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - The duration of time within which data or business process must be restored after a disruption before it can be considered a complete break in continuity.

By thoroughly managing your disaster recovery program, your organization is sure to be able to get its data back--and its business’ processes up and running--to ensure that your business is able to sustain operational integrity. For more information about how to get a data backup and disaster recovery working for your business, call Coleman Technologies today at (604) 513-9428.