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Monday the 2nd

 According to Gartner Research, 25% of all PC users suffer from data loss each year and nearly 7 of 10 small firms that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year.

We all know the importance of backup and the fact that business operations are heavily dependent on backup and any loss or interruption could actually cripple the system all together.

While large enterprise have dedicated IT departments that ensure proper and timely backup recovery, small and medium enterprises (SME) are often found to be over-confident when it comes to their backup systems.

I have reviewed many SME’s backup system and found that most are running their backup consistently and observing a “backup success” report on a regular basis. However, I discovered that many businesses do not perform a regular restore test on the backup. If you have to restore your server from scratch during business hours, how long will this take and how much downtime can your business tolerate while the restore is taking place?

Consider This…

Recently, we performed a restore for a business in Melbourne. The server crashed with serious data corruption and the only course of action was to restore the server back to the last good backup. Their backup has been reliable and consistent so the data integrity was intact but the restore process took nearly 12 hours because their data was massive. Although they did all the right things to ensure that the backup was running smoothly, the backup was not restored until the night which kept the 45 staff from accessing their e-mails, customer database and other project directories for the whole day.

In this case, even though the company’s data was safe, the business was severely affected by the amount of downtime required to restore the server.

The Golden Rule is: Recovery Time < Tolerance Time

Your backup and disaster recovery for your business is directly related to how much downtime your business can realistically tolerate. If you cannot have any downtime at all, then do you have the infrastructure to keep the server continuously running against all disaster? A simple daily backup certainly will not do this for you.

So what is your tolerance level? Zero, 2 or 4 hours? Or is it a day or 2 days?

Does your disaster recovery strategy meet your tolerance level?

Server recovery tools and methods have become more and more accessible and affordable for businesses.

Business owners and managers should be asking more questions about their backup. Perhaps ask yourself “How much downtime can my business afford?” or ask your IT provider – “When did you performed a FULL restore test on the server and how long did it take?”.