By Tom Poole, CEO, SMB Nation
When I was a kid, some of our close family friends moved to Fairbanks, Alaska. At the time, fire protection was an “opt-in” affair. Long story short, they did not opt-in, and their house caught fire. The fire trucks showed up, but only to protect the neighbor’s houses who had opted in. Our poor friends stood there and watched their house burn down to the foundation.
Recently, a company that I serve on the board of directors of had the high-tech equivalent of this. We thought we were doing a good job of backing-up our data with a more traditional tape backup program. Then disaster struck. The HVAC in the server room broke, the room reached very high temperatures, and in simple terms, the servers melted. Initially, we were not too concerned as we knew most of the data had been backed up. Or so we thought.
While the backups were showing as being successful, when we went to restore them, they were corrupt. We are talking about a fairly data-intensive company that has been around for several decades. We quickly sent the hard-drives to the recovery experts and waited for their assessment. Several days later we got the word back. They were able to recover about 60% of the data. The rest was lost. Imagine if you lost 40% of your critical data.
Bottom-line is backup and disaster recovery have come so far in the last couple of years that there was simply no excuse for us being in this scenario. While data has always been important to a company, in many cases today, your data IS the company. No data, no business. In this case, our business survived, but it was a painful and expensive few weeks. Many businesses do not survive such a data loss.
Needless to say I am a converted evangelist for a solid backup and data recovery plan. If a catastrophe happens, and you have to ask about your data, it’s already too late. The good news is implementing an enterprise quality backup and disaster recovery plan is now available and affordable for even the smallest companies. With cloud based applications available now, it is as simple as set and forget.
Don’t wait until the fire truck shows up at your house to figure out you haven’t opted into the plan. My good friends at Symform have a free plan that will get you started. Their technology is simple, amazing and secure. Give them a shot, your business could depend on it!
