Tuesday, 8 September 2015 Blog ehdf

Top Ways to Disaster-Proof Your Critical Business Data

– 96 % of all business workstations are not being backed up (Contingency Planning and Strategic Research Corporation)

– 30 % of small business will experience a natural disaster (National Federation of Independent Businesses)

– 60 % of companies that lose their data will shut down within six months of the disaster (National Archives & Records Administration in Washington), and

– 93 % of companies that lost their data centre for ten or more days due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster (National Archives & Records Administration in Washington)

It’s also worth noting that we are not only talking about start-ups here. In 2014, the data centres of a global smartphones company caught fire and prevented users from accessing apps on the devices sold by the company.

Thus, having a contingency plan is a critical part of being a responsible business, whether you’re one of the top tech businesses in the world or one of the thousands and thousands of SMBs that make up the backbone of the economy.

Here are 10 quick steps to ensure that your data is disaster-ready if and when a disaster takes place:

1. Conduct a data assessment to better prioritize what data you need to have on hand after a disaster and who will need to have access to it

2. Define what an acceptable recovery time is and choose the right storage media

3. Create a disaster recovery plan and test it

4. Make sure sensitive data is properly encrypted

5. Regularly back-up and snapshot data

6. Make sure critical applications are always accessible

7. Don’t neglect laptops as according to Gartner, two-thirds of corporate data lives outside the data centre

8. Maintain three copies of the data, stored on two different kinds of media, with one of them stored offsite

9. Keep backups off site, in a safe location

10. Store data in a secure cloud

We also suggest working with a trusted services provider to disaster proof data & IT systems. This will not only ensure high availability of your data and IT infrastructure, but will also let you focus on core business activities that require your attention the most.