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Hey, everyone, Glenn here with Mighty Manatee IT. Today we go beyond the backup. Backups 201. What happens when bad things happen? When do we use the backups that we have? Well, we use them when we need to go into disaster recovery mode, or we need to address business continuity. First, let's go over what disaster recovery and business continuity are. Disaster Recovery is a data-centric process that lets you regain access to your company's critical data after an incident occurs. Fire, flood, equipment failure, whatever it may be; it's how we get you access back into your systems and data. Business Continuity is a business-centric process. While it includes disaster recovery, it includes the plans and processes for getting your business operational again. What happens when your facilities unavailable? What happens when your phones are unavailable? What is the process ofgetting your business back up and running again? Business Continuity addresses all these questions. With disaster recovery and business continuity, there are two key metrics that we need to consider. The recovery time objective, the RTO, and the recovery point objective, the RPO. RTO is how much time can go by after an incident before your systems need to be back up and running. If you're an accountant in tax season, you need to be up and running within an hour or two. Where if you were off season, a day or two might be more acceptable. The recovery point objective is how much data can you afford to be without. If you do a daily backup at 4 p.m. daily and your systems crashes at 3:30 p.m, then you would lose 24 hours worth of data, depending on your business, that may or may not be acceptable. So once we know the RPO and RTO, there's one the last piece we need to account for. Where are we going to have to recover the data to? If there's an incident at your office and you lose access to the office, are you expecting to acquire new equipment and start a new physical location or are we going to recover to the cloud and have remote access to those systems. Once that's planned, we can then design a backup system based on your business's needs, the RTO and the RPO, plus the amount of data that you have, how many systems do we have to bring up and the time involved in doing it. This is all wonderful information, but why should you care about all this? You care about all of this because of the cost of downtime. That is the motivating factor to get your business up and running as soon as possible. You've got to look at the number of employees that you have, their cost to you per hour, and then their potential lost revenue per hour for the time period your systems are unavailable. All the time your system are unavailable is lost money. So that determines what your budget is going to be for recovery access to your data within your time frame necessary. We put all these pieces together to get you the best plan for your budget and your business to get you operational as soon as possible. So this is your 10,000-foot overview of disaster recovery and business continuity. It's a complex subject that we can't just cover in a quick blog. So if you have any questions at all about this, feel free to reach out to us on our Contact Page. Our own Glenn Holcomb was one of the featured speakers on May 11th's Coffee with the Chamber. He talked about putting your best face forward when using Zoom. Check it out below. Glenn Holcomb discusses the what, who, why and how of backups. We give the top 5 reasons using a free email service can hurt your business. |
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