What You Need to Have a Solid Recovery Strategy

No one can tell when a disaster is going to hit your business or what form that disaster is going to take. The cause could be a storm, human error, or some freak occurrence that nobody could have seen coming. In order to get back up and running after one of these incidents a company needs to have a strong business continuity strategy. An essential part of this strategy is knowing how to recover data depending on the way it’s lost. Getting data back and working for your company is the only way to stave off ruin, so let’s look at data recovery strategies that can literally save your business.

Infonomics and Your Data’s Value

Your business’ data has a certain value to you, and depending on whose data it is, to your clients, vendors, employees, and whomever else trusts you enough to share their personal data with you. At any rate, any data loss is a big deal; and nowadays it has become a large field of study called infonomics. Infonomics can put an actual dollar value on the data your organization has on hand and uses some very poignant questions to do so. These questions include:

• How much capital would replacing the data cost? 
• How much and what percentage is your organization’s data?
• What kind of revenue could your organization see if it were to buy and sell it? 
• What will it cost to completely protect the data? 

These questions will go a long way toward making you understand exactly what kind of data you need to protect in order to keep your business from suffering some of the negative circumstances brought on by data loss. Let’s take a look at some concepts you need to understand if you are going to successfully protect your organization's data.

Data Backup

The first is one of the most obvious. In order to keep data from being lost, many organizations roll out comprehensive data backup systems that take snapshots of data as it changes. This provides an extraordinarily useful tool for network administrators to have if the data is corrupted or has been lost or damaged somehow.

At SMART Services, we offer a backup and disaster recovery service that features incremental backups that are stored both locally in a network-attached device, and offsite in a secure data center. The total data redundancy ensures that you will always have access to the data you need, when you need it. 

Disaster Recovery

The disaster recovery part of the BDR is not to be taken lightly. For data recovery, you make contingencies for situations and hope that you never have to use them. The two main factors in a disaster recovery platform are:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - The amount of time that your core business processes can be interrupted before your business begins to fail.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - The amount of time your business can withstand interruption before it can be considered a complete break in continuity. 

The shorter the duration of RPO and RTO, the more diligent you have to be in keeping data ready for recovery. In managing your organizational expectations in regard to business continuity, it is essential that any strategy has succinctly taken into account the disaster recovery metrics. These will always dictate how you need to approach data recovery. 

At SMART Services, we take data redundancy extremely seriously, and would like to help your organization set up a backup and disaster recovery platform that works to protect your business’ most important asset: its data. For more information call the IT professionals at 586 258-0650 today.