The Houston metropolitan area sees more than its fair share of natural disasters, and this year’s Hurricane Harvey certainly won’t be the last. Whether it’s a tornado, a flood or any other kind of disaster, you owe it to the future of your business to take every possible measure to prepare for the worst.
While there’s usually some warning preceding natural disasters, that doesn’t mean your data is always going to be safe. There are also cyberthreats to think about and, with hackers getting bolder all the time, you can never be too careful when it comes to safeguarding your confidential business data.
In any case, a complete backup of your systems and data is your critical last line of defense.
Many companies store backups on-site, using network-attached storage systems or tape drives, for the sake of convenience. Understanding that keeping everything in one place is hardly a good idea, most organizations also rely on off-site backups by copying over data to portable media like tapes.
Relying on traditional backup solutions is a recipe for disaster in a world becoming increasingly reliant on digital data. Here’s why:
Vulnerability to Loss and Corruption
Just like any other hardware, storage devices deteriorate over time. Tape drives, which have been the standard in business data archiving since the early nineties, may last up to 30 years, but only if they’re stored under perfect conditions. Other devices tend to last a lot less. Add factors such as increased humidity or extreme temperatures into the mix, and the lifespan of your backups will plummet.
Physical data storage devices are also vulnerable to a multitude of other threats. Magnetic media, such as tape drives and traditional hard drives, for example, are vulnerable to magnetic interference, which may corrupt the data stored on them. Other factors include exposure to the sun, poor handling practices and other forms of physical damage.
As physical devices, traditional backups are far more susceptible to theft. Many data archiving facilities simply aren’t secure enough, and it all costs extra money to rent or buy the additional storage space anyway. This being the case, smaller companies on limited budgets might be tempted to let their employees take backups home with them, which only presents more problems when it comes to security.
Inefficient Archiving and Recovery
Manually archiving increasingly large data sets is a labor-intensive process. And in the case of many businesses, it’s a full-time job. Aside from physically adding and removing storage media while creating backup archives, technicians also need to track progress, identify all important data to be backed up and conduct periodic tests to ensure the integrity of the media being used.
Recovery times are equally labor-intensive, especially in cases where backups are stored in off-site storage facilities and need to be transported back to your business premises. In fact, it can easily end up taking several days for backups to be fully restored, during which your business could lose hundreds of thousands of dollars due to unscheduled downtime.
How the Cloud Can Solve Your Disaster Recovery Woes
As we’ve seen, traditional backup methods are both costly and inefficient. However, when disaster strikes, it’s in your company’s best interest to ensure that recovery is as quick and hassle-free as possible. That’s why organizations are now turning to the cloud for their solutions.
Cloud-based backup systems are fully automated, which translates into much greater efficiency, lower costs, and reduced risk of human error. What’s more, your data will be stored in cutting-edge data centers in multiple physical locations. When it comes to data recovery operations, your business will also be taken care of as per the obligations of the vendor’s service level agreement (SLA).
Truewater offers a dependable disaster recovery solution that automatically backs up your data every hour and synchronizes it with cloud-based servers. That means you can be back in operation in less than an hour after a severe data loss incident. Call us today if you’re looking for a backup solution that really works.