Things can go wrong at the drop of a hat in business, especially where technology is concerned. Everything can be lost at the worst of times, due to things out of your control. Power outage, cyber attacks, human error, you never know what could occur. You could have everything saved to a traditional backup system, but that comes with a catch. It’s on site and managed by you, meaning if something goes wrong inside the business, the backup could be affected as well.
Business continuity ensures that nothing goes wrong with your information by storing it off site with a company that protects it with the best services money can buy. Business continuity is a server that backs up your information and files every 30 minutes. If something goes wrong, the system can simply grab the nearest available save point and pick up from there to ensure you are always running. The server is hosted off site to protect any data that might be corrupted or stolen should something happen directly to your business. All backups are stored and encrypted to meet compliance standards and the entire server is backed up, not just a few files or emails. If things look particularly tricky, you can run your server through the datacenter until things are up and running.
The defining differences between traditional backup and business continuity is storage space and reliability. Traditional backup retains the information from the last two to four weeks and only in certain blocks of info. That means that should you need to reset using what’s been stored, there could be information lost in the transfer. Best case is that everything is up and running, but not until you get a replacement server. With business continuity, you don’t have to worry about any of that. You can have everything up and running within the hour and have all the information and files readily at hand.
Imagine a disaster strikes. A storm hits and downs the power lines, which causes everything in your business to shut down temporarily. You get things up and running and realize that the server is still down. You try to get things fixed and use the backups you’ve been managing, but weeks of work have just been lost since the closest checkpoint was two weeks ago. Now you are behind schedule, scrambling for information, and trying your best to keep things running right off of a disaster. It doesn’t sound as smooth as you would like it to, does it? With the right plan, you can skip the hassle and fear and move straight back in to work. You lose only the most recent files, if any, and can run your server through another host while you repair yours. There are always plenty of backup plans when it comes to business continuity, so make sure you make the right choice when it comes to protecting your businesses assets.