Disaster Recovery Planning and Preparedness are key
Fires, floods, weather related issues, accidents, viruses, malware can all spell disaster. It’s essential to be prepared.
Minimize lost productivity and lost data by having a solid disaster recovery plan.
Artful IT Services will work with your business to prepare a disaster recovery plan which best suits your small business, IT environment, staff and critical systems.
We evaluate and identify mission critical data and take steps to include into the disaster recovery master plan. Our goal is to provide quick solutions for affected systems and lessen any potential data loss.
Sadly most of these incidents are out of our control but we can control how prepared we are so it will lessen the impact to your business.
A cornerstone to this approach is the proper safe guarding of systems, staff training and standards implemented such as anti virus software, scheduled off-site data back up and the like.
Per Wikipedia, Data backup is defined as – a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event.
Sadly, disaster recovery planning rarely gets the attention it deserves until there is a loss or threat.
Generally most people think about fires, floods or other disasters in conjunction with data loss. A far more likely threat is theft of equipment, viruses, or employee negligence. Losing company data can be truly disastrous. Quite often stories can be found on TV newscasts or social media about hackers or would-be wrong doers holding company data for ransom or personal data that has been breached. Lets keep your company out of the limelight. Well, at least that type of limelight.
These risks can be mitigated with an effective, secure data backup plan.
We’d like to report that the backup practice of yesteryear has changed ; the usual workflow for small and medium sized business was the customer backing up data at a frequency of X and the backup device (tape, hard drive, thumb drive, etc) would go off site. Quite often the backup would go home with an employee or manager, a safe deposit box or simply go into a drawer and stay on-site. For those less prepared, there was no formal backup process in place whatsoever. There have been countless local stories of lost information, heartbreak, lost receivables or mission critical data which have resulted in staggering losses, bankruptcy or losing clientele due to severe business interruptions. While many businesses have become more aware of the importance of a disaster recovery plan, many have not taken the proper steps to properly safeguard their company’s data. These antiquated practices still exist in many businesses, quite often when we are assessing a new client its rare that this isn’t the current practice.
There is a better way.
There are several options for backing up and protecting company data. Firstly our clients need to identify which data to backup. Back up all of it or just the mission critical data? Who decides what is deemed mission critical? What might not be considered mission critical data today might be tomorrow. These answers can be found in a company disaster recovery plan. Having a disaster recovery program in place which is regularly updated, off site and has numerous safeguards in place is the way to go.
So just what do we do with this data? Generally go to answer in 2024 is to put ‘backup data into the cloud’. Sounds simple and certainly makes sense but do we know exactly where this data will be housed? Out of country/Overseas? Is this data encrypted while in transmission and while in storage?
Thankfully we are here to assist our clients to make informed decisions. During our assessment process we identify all company data and develop a plan for data backup and recovery. All our customers data is housed in our Canadian data centres, is encrypted and has a scheduled transmission plan. These days the cost for secure data backup is relatively inexpensive and many clients view this as a very important form of insurance to safeguard against data loss.
We work with our clients to ensure they are as protected as possible. Secure backup services are available to our clients in the Winnipeg area and across Canada. Please contact us for a full review of your disaster recovery program
