Three Critical Elements You Must Have In Place To Guarantee A Fast, Pain-Free Recovery Of Your Critical IT Systems

Yet Most Businesses Don’t Have Even One

When it comes to backing up and protecting your company’s critical data, you need to know for certain – without any lingering doubts – that you could recover your files and be back up and running again fast after a natural disaster, server crash, hacker attack or other data-erasing event. Here are 3 critical elements you must have to guarantee a painless recovery when things go wrong.

Critical Element #1: Secure Off-site Backup

While we recommend that you have on-site backup, it’s absolutely critical to keep a copy of your data off-site as well. If a fire burns your office to the ground – or a thief breaks in and steals your server and equipment – or a natural disaster floods your office or makes it impossible to access your PCs and server – the on-site backup will be useless to you.

Critical Element #2: A Data Recovery And Disaster Recovery Plan

A HUGE mistake many business owners make is thinking that data backup is the same as disaster recovery – it’s not. Many business owners are shocked to find out just how long and arduous the process is to get all their data back after a disaster – and that’s IF they have a good, clean copy of ALL their data (most are surprised to find out they don’t). Just having a copy of your data isn’t enough; you need to have a plan in place to get everything restored quickly, which is something that many solutions don’t offer.

Critical Element #3: Test Restores

After you have a good backup system in place, you need to test it regularly to make sure it works. The point is, there’s something wrong if you aren’t doing this simple check at least once a quarter. If your current IT person is not doing this, you can’t have any confidence in your current backup system.