Data loss can be devastating for any business, it leads to loss of business opportunities, brand reputation, and customer trust.
One of the dreaded questions any business owner or an IT pro would not like to hear is… “Are we back up and running yet?” Ever thought, why you need a data backup and recovery solution?
Let’s just assume that one fine morning your systems crashed or there was a natural disaster, and you lost all your valuable data. It sounds like a nightmare, doesn't it? This pretty much answers the above question. Being an organization's financial data, systems, applications are your valuable assets.
Few Instances of Data Loss:
Data loss is the new horrendous dream for the corporations. Severe incidents continue to make headlines, and for many organizations, huge losses are just tick-tocking away. Let’s have a look at few of such instances:
Instance 1:
What Happened?
According to “The Galt Herald”, recently the Galt Police department in California lost almost 18 months’ (one and a half year) data due to system failure.
How?
Apparently, the reason for such an enormous data loss was the lack of communication between their RIMS server and backup server.
*RIMS Server (Where data used to get backed up on a regular basis)
Lost Data:
Drug-related and burglary cases
Upshot:
Some data recovered manually but took too much time.
Problem:
Absence of an effective data backup and disaster recovery plan
Instance 2:
What Happened?
According to CBC News, Memory University (MUN) lost its data during routine maintenance inside the library due to a server crash.
How?
The routine maintenance of their library needed power for which they relied on the backup power supply. But this time, unfortunately, the backup battery power couldn’t stay for long, thus resulting into loss of documents stored in a digital archive.
Lost Data:
Documents, records of artifacts, photographs and newspapers from Newfoundland and Labrador history.
Upshot:
“Lost but not gone”. MUN had saved all their documents physically, thus restoring them digitally took almost two months.
Problem:
Absence of an effective data backup and disaster recovery plan
As you can clearly see in both the above instances the reason for the data loss was not having a proper data backup and recovery plan in place. It’s not always a natural disaster or a system crash but even a cybersecurity breach can affect your systems, resulting in data loss. According to the latest Cisco 2018 Annual Cybersecurity Report, in 2017, 32 percent of security professionals said half of their systems were affected by the breaches when compared to 15 percent in 2016. Thus with more and more systems getting affected, the rate of companies investing in security defense solutions has increased to 41 percent in 2017, when compared to 37 percent in 2016.
Reference for the Cisco cybersecurity annual report:
Data Backup and Disaster Recovery are “NOT” the Same:
It is mostly seen that one in four business shuts down as an outcome of a disaster, some estimates are even more pessimistic. To ensure that this doesn’t happen to your organization you need to have proper data backup along with a concrete recovery plan in place. At times, it is seen that companies fallaciously believe that if they have proper data backup solution then they have the best disaster recovery plan by default.
In simple words, an act of taking the backup is defined as a data backup, while restoring the same backup to the original state before failure is known as disaster recovery, as it ensures minimum data loss.
RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (recovery point objective) are the two major factors to take into consideration with backup and disaster recovery. The backup solution handles the recovery point objective, as it controls to which point you can restore data. The recovery time objective, comes under disaster recovery’s domain, as it defines the amount of time you need to take to restore your system infrastructure.
The big conundrum, thus, isn’t which one is the most significant, data backup or disaster recovery; instead, think how can you implement both in a way that they allow your business to grow without the threat of a data disaster.
The Crux of the Story:
Both are mandatory. Your data backups are useless without a plan for disaster recovery, and you cannot have an effectual disaster recovery without data backups.
Preferably, you need a solution that is designed to automatically recover your data in the event of downtime.
Why Zmanda?
In this world where each minute a threat of data disaster looms over our head, a perfect data backup and recovery solution is need of the hour. If you are an organization looking for a perfect data backup and recovery solution then, Zmanda is your one-stop solution. Zmanda, an enterprise software provides a simplified GUI (Graphical User Interface) for backup management and recovery along with 24x7 support worldwide. With Zmanda you get “peace of mind” free as in any complex situations or disaster you can restore your valuable data in no time. Zmanda provides active plugin integrations to on-Prim /offline and cloud solutions to backup and restores data.
Be sure to also check out the Points to Include in Your Disaster Recovery Plan
