As businesses struggle to keep pace with consumer expectations and enterprises rely more heavily on continuous access to crucial information, the need for effective data storage and backup recovery continues to grow. Companies require business continuity strategies that ensure accessibility and prevent the revenue losses that occur from downtime or corrupted data.
Universal Concepts
Regardless of the number of employees, almost every business depends on having continuous access to important digitized data. For example, if an e-commerce business experiences a downed website, lost transaction records or compromised shipping information can result in huge revenue losses and even more debilitating damage from lost consumer confidence.
Data security regulations and compliance procedures are in a continual state of evolution. Companies must operate with protocols that conform to storage, backup, transfer, and processing restrictions to avoid significant liabilities and costs.
Therefore, the focus on 24/7 uptime forms an essential aspect of every properly deployed business continuity plan. Enterprises need assurance that natural disasters, hardware failures, and similar events won’t interfere with daily operations while behind-the-scenes experts restore vital technology.
Strategies and Options
Business continuity is more than simply arranging for physical data recovery, virtualized servers, and similar tech solutions; it requires the development of a comprehensive, actionable recovery strategy that encompasses the entire company structure. To ensure success, an organizational plan that outlines employee expectations and responsibilities during an incident is essential, and service level agreements should be aligned with any recovery plan.
Regular testing that measures both the recovery time objective (RTO) and the recovery point objective (RPO) is important for ensuring peace of mind. However, this can be costly to perform in-house. With the advent of cloud computing, a qualified service provider is able to offer data management solutions that provide proactive business continuity assistance, utilizing recovery parameters that meet specific industry requirements through public, private, or hybrid cloud options.
Cloud Services
Cloud services are attractive for a number of reasons. In addition to the ability to replicate and store data in an offsite, secure location, cloud services are an affordable option for many small businesses. With cloud's inherent flexibility, companies can choose to scale usage according to their specific needs, thus reducing costs. Options include:
Public—With public cloud resources, businesses purchase storage capacity from a provider who maintains the hardware and infrastructure at an offsite location. The business basically “shares” a portion of the cloud.
Private—Completely self-contained, private cloud storage isn’t accessible to other users. The hardware and infrastructure is possessed and maintained by the cloud owner, offering unique storage with heightened performance for companies who must conform to regulatory restrictions that would be violated using the public cloud.
Hybrid—Utilizing a combination of on premise backup and data recovery methods with public and, in some cases, private cloud additions, companies often achieve optimum cost-efficiency with a hybrid solution. The flexibility of this option offers simple ways to successfully handle rapid expansion or similar cost and demand fluctuations.
Building business continuity is really about developing a strategy that ensures uninterrupted operations. To learn more about how Enterprise Visions can develop customized data recovery and management solutions that maximize business continuity, contact us to arrange for a no obligation strategy session today.