Backup versus Business Continuity

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Data protection solutions are essential for businesses of all sizes to implement, regardless of size, industry and geographic location. In this article we discuss the importance of business continuity rather than simply backup.

Introduction

Downtime is real and it’s costly. How costly exactly? Depending on the size of the organization, the cost per hour of downtime is anywhere from $9,000- $700,000.

On average, a business will lose around $164,000 per hour of downtime.

The numbers speak for themselves. What causes downtime?

  • Network outages and human error account for 50% and 45% of downtime, respectively.
  • Meanwhile, natural disasters account for just 10 percent of downtime.
  • When you look at the cause of downtime by data volume, the #1 culprit is, once again, human error, at 58%.

Just look at the recent Amazon AWS outtage: http://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-explains-massive-aws-outage-says-employee-error-took-servers-offline-promises-changes/

As it turns out, businesses should be more wary of their own employees and less of natural disasters. If you’ve been putting off data protection because your organization is located far from any inclement weather, be warned: the bigger threat to your data is inside of your company, not the great outdoors.

What’s at stake?

2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated daily. And 90% of the total data in existence was created within the past few years, a significant portion of which has been generated by small businesses. Considering all the servers, desktops, and laptops that the typical SMBs manage, it adds up to a lot of data to protect. Yet nearly 75% of SMBs operate without a disaster recovery plan and only 25% are “extremely confident” that they can restore data if it was compromised.

Only 50% of SMBs back up less than 60% of their data. The remaining 40%? No protection for it whatsoever.

How much does this cost? Over the past few years, 35% of SMBs lost as much as $500K due to downtime. An unlucky 3% lost over $1 million.

 

What to look for in a business continuity solution

To sum up what we’ve learned today, here are some key things to look for when seeking a business continuity solution:

  • Hybrid cloud backup—A hybrid approach fixes the vulnerabilities that a cloud-only or local-only possess.
  • Superior RTO and RPO—Think in terms of business continuity rather than simply backup, and calculate how much downtime your business can endure and still survive (RTO) as well as how much data you can afford to lose (RPO).
  • Image-based backup—Make sure that the backup solution takes images of all data and systems rather than simply copying the files.

Forte, in conjunction with our business continuity partner, Datto, can help your company meet it’s disaster recovery targets. No matter if your downtime was caused by a hardware failure, ransomware or the inadvertent keystroke of a well meaning employee.