“How important is your data?” This is one of the key questions that I ask business owners when I meet with them to discuss their IT. If I get a wishy washy answer I then ask “If that computer’s hard drive failed or if you had a fire and lost all the data on that PC, how would it affect your business?”. Generally this gets the answers that I am after, as the look of horror starts to spread across the business owners or IT managers face. Answers start to come forward like “I would lose my job” or “I could go out of business” or “that would cost me thousands to get that data back”.

Studies have shown that 70% of business that suffer a critical data loss go out of business within 12 months. Contingency Planning, Strategic Research Corp and DTI/Price Waterhouse Coopers (2004)

These days business is becoming close to, if not 100% computerised, almost all parts of the business are done on a computer now! Accounts, contacts with customers, advertising, systems and processors, reports and the creation of computer documents. If your business data gets destroyed there is a high chance it could cost you thousands of dollars to get it back or it could potentially put you out of business.

Don’t wait for the disaster to happen before you take measures to protect your data! It is so easy and affordable. Another major issue that people don’t realise is the importance of business continuity. Organisations are happy in the fact that they have backed up their server data, however what they don’t realise is that if their server hardware failed it would take approximately a week to rebuild their server so it would be back to a place where they could put their data back on. That is why system state backup services have been developed. What this does is take a snap shot of the system up to 15 minute intervals and stores this data on another device like an external hard drive or a NAS. If the system experiences a system failure, that entire server or desktop setup including the operating system can be restored on a different piece of hardware within 30 – 60 minutes rather than waiting for the server to be rebuilt. If up time of your servers is critical to your organisation you certainly should consider getting one of these system state backups on your system.

With the advent of affordable, online automated backup there really is no reason why you can’t protect all your business data today.

Dan Ballard CyberHub

Dan Ballard is a Technology Writer and a IT Business Development Manager. He specialises in showing businesses and organisation how to make the best use of technology.

CyberHub’s articles are a free resource for people in business to show them the best ways to make use of technology. CyberHub covers many different topics from the benefits of Outsourcing vs In-housing to IT security and how to effectively market online plus much more.

http://www.cyberhub.co.nz

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