Being able to keep a business running smoothly is more critical than ever in today’s competitive environment, and any interruption in service can lead to serious – even fatal – consequences.
But trying to keep a business continually operating at a high level is demanding for any organization. Just consider some of the challenges:
- Cyberattacks: There were more than 4.5 billion data records that were compromised worldwide in the first half of 2018, and more complicated malware is expected to make threats even more difficult to detect in 2019.
- Disasters: While local backups may be able to recover IT systems from server failure and other common problems, those backups can be destroyed in a site-wide disaster such as an earthquake or flood.
- Human error: Businesses might believe they can recover data lost through human error on Office 365, for example, but Microsoft cannot recover the original file if it’s accidentally overwritten – and any recovery can take hours, days or weeks.
That’s why cloud backup is so important to business continuity today: It provides a way to access and recover data quickly and easily. Without it, organizations risk customers moving onto the competition and never returning.
Here are some ways that your business can survive – and thrive – when using cloud backup:
- It’s automatic. No need to sweat the details; the cloud backup does exactly what the name implies. Need to recover information that a disgruntled employee deleted? You can do it in a few seconds. In addition, automatic audit reports allow you to see that backups are taking place and protecting your data.
- It’s cost effective. Gartner estimates that the average downtime from a natural disaster or ransomware attack is about $300,000 per hour because of lost productivity and revenue, in addition to damaging a company’s brand and reputation. Since data replication may be cost prohibitive for some organizations, cloud backup offers a viable, cost-effective disaster recovery plan that has predictable pricing.
- It’s always accessible. Businesses often operate across various time zones and in different countries. Cloud backup ensures that the data is safe and accessible 24/7.
- It’s safe. Data is transmitted and stored in an encrypted format.
- It’s customizable. Cloud recovery settings can be designed to fit any IT environment, whether it’s for a small or large organization. For example, a hybrid cloud solution can allow an organization to combine public cloud services like Amazon or Google with a private cloud infrastructure. With the public and private environment running independent of one another, they still can communicate via an encrypted connection, either through the public internet or through a private dedicated link.
- It’s efficient. If you need to prove your business is in compliance with various regulations, cloud backup can give you easy access to archived data. Or, if you require data for an investigation or electronic discovery efforts, cloud backup gives you easy access, ensuring information is collected in the fastest way possible. Cloud backup ensures your business continuity is not disrupted by personnel being pulled away to handle onerous data recovery.
At a time when businesses face malicious cyberattacks, growing international competition and new compliance measures, cloud backup offers a fast and easy way to manage the organization seamlessly while growing customer loyalty and boosting brand awareness.
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You’re correct, we were referring to the guest. But, after further review, we noticed that the sentence you pointed out in step five doesn’t quite fit with the remainder of the post, so we’ve removed it. It is, however, still important to check the virtual machines’ event logs for VSS errors-- this is just a standard best practice to make sure everything is running smoothly.
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Nice catch, Eric. Looks like "it"" got away from me."
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Interesting point, Kurt. The more you lean on the cloud, the more you stand to be without if your cloud provider takes a temporary fall. An example would be the recent outage of Microsoft Azure (check out our article) For disaster recovery, the cloud is great because your backups are there in emergency when you need them. It's very important who you choose to work with when it comes to storing your backups in the cloud and you'll want to go with people in the industry that are true experts in backup and disaster recovery. The idea behind backup and disaster recovery is redundancy. You need a backup of, well, everything. That means if you've got a cloud provider taking care of infrastructure needs you'll probably want to have a plan for what you'll do if their cloud goes down for awhile. If you're relying on your own hardware, you'll want it backed up to a place that allows you to easily retrieve it in an emergency. What's even better is to use a cloud provider that gives you the ability to virtualize from the cloud so that your downtime is almost nothing. Check out StorageCraft Cloud Services if you'd like to learn more."
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Hello Carlo,
Yes, you have pointed out the travails of being both a Techie and a Marketer, namely predicting software release dates. We both know how fast technology changes these days. What with Microsoft updates, new hardware (and the associated drivers), the constant flow of Linux distros, and StorageCraft's penchant for getting everything perfectly aligned before a release and my job as a Technical Marketer job becomes nigh impossible. I apologize for getting the date wrong, and will post more information about the upcoming software release as soon as I get it.
Thank you for keeping me honest.
Cheers,
Steven