I feel like most people these days understand that data can be lost. Whether it’s due to theft, fire, flood, ransomware, or accident, in this day and age, data loss is a fact of life.
IT professionals like myself have been encouraging businesses and individuals alike for years to back up their data. The problem is backups aren’t enough any more. If you truly want to mitigate your business’ losses in the event of a data loss, you need to plan ahead. You need a Disaster Recovery plan.
Take a look at the video below and if you have any questions afterwards, please feel free to contact us. One of our engineers would be happy to help you figure out the most cost-effective way to get the protection you need. If you’re unable to view the video below for any reason, I have included a copy of the full transcript below for your convenience.
Full Video Transcript:
[Edited for improved readability]
Hey guys! Phil Denton here from Denton Business Solutions, where We Take the Stress out of IT!
I know it’s late, but I want to post this video real quick because I think it is really important to mention. A lot of companies talk about having backups, and backups are super important to protect your company against loss due to theft, fire, flood, or ransomware, whatever the case may be.
Backups are super super super important and you probably hear about it all the time if you own a business, if you’re in an IT department, or if you’re responsible for a business’s IT or operational health. But! What I want to mention is backups are great but what’s even better, even greater is disaster recovery!
The fact that you’re copying your data off and taking backups of all your servers and computers is great but what I really want you to think about is disaster recovery. If you have another copy of your data somewhere, either on-site or off-site, my question to you is: How do you restore that backup data into your business so you can get up and running again?
You have a backup copy of our data somewhere. How do you use that backup to get back to work?
For example, if you have a server in your business and a pipe bursts and floods the server, and the server dies, you have to restore from your backups. But how are you going to do that? Your server just got soaked. Are going to go to Micro Center and buy a new server? Do you have a secondary server somewhere else? Do you have a secondary site where you can restore this data and spin up a new virtual server quickly? Are you going to spin up something in the cloud? There’s lots and lots and lots of ways to do disaster recovery.
I just came back from a DR test tonight, just like I mentioned, and the way I like to do DR is with products from a company called Datto. Datto makes these little boxes I can put on-site, and these Datto devices make copies of every computer and server that needs to get backed up. So the Datto device copies a company’s server onto itself and then it even takes that server copy and syncs it up to the cloud, too.
What we did tonight was a Disaster Recovery test, which means after backing up this client’s server for a while, today we tested the Disaster Recovery plan to make sure the backups actually work.
In this case, we unplugged the client’s production server and I was able to power up a clone of their server in the cloud, and within a few minutes they were able to get to all their files, open up QuickBooks, check on transaction history, make transactions and check runs and stuff, and basically get back up and running without any problems in about ten minutes or so.
Again, backups are great but I want you to really think about Disaster Recovery because it can be very very easy to do, super low maintenance. Doesn’t have to be expensive and while backups are great I just want to make sure you’re thinking about Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery too, not just backups.
Just a little something to chew on throughout the weekend. If you have any questions, just let me know – leave a comment below, send me an email or something or contact me on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, wherever the case may be.
Until next time, Stay Safe, Stay Secure, and Stay Productive. Have a great weekend, guys! Bye for now.
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