Safeguarding Your Business from Data Loss
Did you know only 24% of organizations have a well-documented and tested disaster recovery plan? Data is at the core of every business operation. Whether it’s customer information, financial data, or critical software, a single data loss event can disrupt your business, damage your reputation, and lead to significant financial losses. This is why having a robust data backup strategy is essential for business continuity. But backups alone are not enough—your IT service provider must also ensure that they can restore your data quickly and efficiently when disaster strikes.
Protip: Sync Is Not Backup
According to a recent poll by the Disaster Recovery Journal, 84% of IT decision makers say their organizations utilize cloud services. This allows for file storage, remote access, and easy sharing, but may not protect against corruption, accidental deletion, or other critical errors. Sync services automatically update files to include changes or deletions, which can lead to data loss. Backup services are still needed in conjunction with cloud syncing to make sure your files are available if something happens.
Why Backups Matter
Business continuity relies on the availability of critical data, and backups are a primary defense mechanism against data loss caused by hardware failures, cyberattacks, natural disasters, or human error. Without a tested, complete backup, your business could suffer significant downtime and customer loss in the event of a disaster.
It’s also important to go beyond just storing copies of your data. According to research by Avast, around 60% of backups are considered incomplete or fail to capture all necessary data, and 50% of data restorations fail.
This discrepancy highlights a critical issue: backup failure is more common than most companies realize. When disaster strikes, the ability to restore data quickly and accurately is crucial to minimizing downtime and financial losses. A comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) test ensures that not only are your backups in place, but that they can be restored effectively and within a reasonable timeframe.
All Managed Service Providers Should Perform Full Disaster Recovery Testing
A backup should not just be a static copy of your data—it needs to be a reliable, quickly accessible resource in case of emergency. That’s why full disaster recovery testing is an essential part of any robust IT strategy. During a DR test, all servers and systems are restored to the environment to verify the integrity and functionality of your backup files. This process helps identify potential issues with your backup or recovery processes that could slow down recovery time in the event of an actual disaster.
When selecting an IT service provider, transparency is key. Ask your managed service provider for clear documentation on their backup and recovery processes, as well as reporting that shows the status of your backups over time. Ensure that they provide detailed reports of backups made in the last month, including data verification and recovery testing. This transparency will give you peace of mind knowing that your data is protected and that the backup process is functioning as it should.
Frequent, Tested Backups Are the Key to Disaster Recovery
Simply syncing or backing up your data is not enough to guarantee the safety of your files and continuity of your business. A robust disaster recovery plan involves not only keeping data safe but also ensuring it can be restored quickly when needed.
Regular disaster recovery testing, long-term data retention, and transparency from your MSP are essential components of a successful backup strategy. By investing in both backups and testing, you’re taking proactive steps to protect your business from unforeseen disasters and ensuring that you can bounce back quickly when the worst happens.
How can we help?
Ensure your business is protected with our industry-leading backup and disaster recovery solutions. Our dedicated team monitors and manages backups daily and keeps backups for a year. Our Enterprise Unified Backup provides comprehensive protection with frequent onsite and cloud backups, ensuring disaster recovery is seamless and fully tested annually. For Microsoft 365 users, our Managed Cloud Backup safeguards critical data beyond Microsoft’s 30-day retention limit, covering Mail, Calendar, Contacts, OneDrive, and SharePoint. With flexible solutions tailored to your budget and risk tolerance, FIT delivers the security and reliability your business needs.
Contact us today to talk about your disaster recovery plan.
Rapid Recovery: The Time Forward in Technology Restored 440 Critical Files in 45 Minutes
A staff member at a law firm accidentally deleted 440 PDFs while preparing for a case. Thanks to FIT’s industry-leading backup and disaster recovery services, the client was able to recover the files. Within 45 minutes of receiving the support ticket, FIT staff was able to identify the files, their verified backups, and restore them all.
Though rare, these incidents demonstrate the effectiveness of FIT’s backup team using quality tools and processes. With consistently quick resolution, success comes from the combination of employees and procedures. Zoey Koontz, FIT Systems Administrator, stated, “We’ve never had a case at one of our backup clients we haven’t recovered.”