Small to medium sized businesses in general don’t have the same IT budgets and staff as larger enterprises. Yet just like larger organizations they need to protect their data—and make sure they can get back to business rapidly after a disaster or other event that compromises their data and systems. Making sure your business can continue operating in case of a disaster is just as essential to SMBs as it is to the largest enterprises. Consider all the servers, desktops, and laptops that the typical small business must manage. It all adds up to a lot of valuable, irreplaceable data that should be protected. Yet nearly 75 percent of SMBs possess no disaster recovery plan, and only 25 percent are “extremely confident” that they can restore data in the case of an event that destroys their data.
Is it worth the risk to be unprepared?
- 70% of small businesses that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year (Pricewaterhouse-Cooper)
- 35% of SMBs lost as much as $500,000 over the past three years due to downtime. (Independent Oracle User Group)
- 25% of PCs will fail this year (Gartner Group)
- 24% of companies said they experienced a full data disaster (Forrester Research Study)
What causes downtime? As it turns out, businesses should be more wary of their own employees than of natural disasters. So if you’ve been putting protecting your data off because you consider yourself in a safe zone, you need to understand that it’s far more likely that a server will malfunction, malware will be downloaded or that someone will hit the delete key on an important document than anything Mother Nature could throw at you. No business anywhere can afford to be complacent. You’ve bought business insurance for your building and your employees but why not for your business data? Odds are you’ll use your backup and disaster recovery solution before you’ll use your insurance.
What are SMBs doing to protect themselves? Sixty-one percent still ship tapes off to a storage facility or another office – a technology that is now four decades old! But surprisingly only nineteen percent are already utilizing some sort of cloud based data backup. Clearly the solution requires more than just data backup so it’s important to think in terms of business continuity. Cloud-based solutions are increasingly popular, but they provide only a partial answer. On-site solutions also have their weaknesses. But combine the best of both and you have the hybrid cloud. The Hybrid cloud solution delivers Intelligent Business Continuity (IBC) ensuring that data can be recovered as quickly as possible in the event of a disaster and that businesses can even continue normal operations while a disaster is happening. With IBC businesses are assured of automated backup verification, continuous protection, secured storage, fast recovery and more. An IT service provider can manage the entire process ensuring peace of mind.
The hybrid cloud solution provides the best of both the public and private cloud and is the only solution that guarantees uptime. How it works: your data is first copied and stored on a local device. That way, if something happens, you can do a fast and easy restore from that device. Data is also replicated in the cloud so if an extreme event destroys the on-site device, there are off-site cloud copies of your data available immediately.
Ancero is here to help businesses protect their data AND their business investment with Ancero BDR solutions powered by Datto, our simple, secure solution that’s perfect for basic needs of small businesses, law firms, schools, just about anyone who wants flexible storage for documents and media.