Published in the September 2008 edition of Greater Owensboro Business Magazine
Is your business on a crash course?
By Eric Dever
To backup or not to backup, is not the question. Everyone in business today should understand the importance of performing periodic backups and realize that they simply can’t afford to lose their information. 90% of all business records are now produced electronically and less than half of those are ever reproduced in paper form. When a significant computer system outage occurs and critical operational information such as sales histories, inventory figures or accounts receivable is lost, it becomes a real life and death matter for any business. In fact, statistics show that 70% of small and medium businesses fail within 1 year if they experience some disaster and can’t recover their critical data for 10 days or more.
The question is how quickly can you get back to doing business if you lose all of your information? Disaster recovery plans aren’t just for fortune 500 companies, all small and medium businesses should have a plan in place. Despite the obvious need, estimates are that nearly ¾ of small and medium businesses in the U.S. have no disaster recovery plan in place at all and over half of those who responded said they didn’t need one and thought they would be able to resume business within 72 hours of a total loss of information. Reality often proves otherwise, as a computer service provider I've heard many stories of despair that were entirely preventable.
Computer system disasters can come in many forms from user error, corrupt files, a failed disk or even a fire, to natural disasters such as flood, tornado, ice storm, etc… to name a few. The wrong way to find out whether your backup strategy is providing adequate disaster recovery protection is to experience a failure and find out that you can't recover the lost or damaged files from your last backup or, in some extreme cases, any backup at all. For a small percentage of the readers of this article this will be déjà vu, while for others lightening will indeed strike sometime in the future. Like death and taxes, computer failures are going to happen and with potentially disastrous results unless an adequate prevention plan is implemented and maintained on a regular basis.
Disaster preparedness isn’t too costly or complicated for a small business to implement. There are many simple and affordable solutions available to lay the foundation for recovering from the countless computer problems that can occur. A redundant data protection plan is the best practice and utilizing a reputable on-line backup service provider combined with scheduled backups to removable media that is then stored off-site is a great start.
A complete comprehensive recovery plan should take into account everything you would need to do business from some temporary location as a worst case scenario. In addition to storing computer data off-site in a secure location, you should also have copies of your insurance policies, a list of your company credit cards and bank account numbers, extra company checks, an employee contact list (including emergency contact numbers), a current client list, key supplier and vendor contact list and copies of your software originals including installation keys, user access licenses and the software vendor technical support contact information.
If you do already have a disaster recovery plan in place do you maintain it? Even the smallest of businesses should do a walk through disaster recovery exercise at least annually. Test your backups, review documentation to ensure that it is up to date and verify you’re your software media is current and complete as part of your ongoing disaster recovery plan, this will prove to critical to finding and fixing flaws in your plan before it really counts.