Reduce Business Disruption with Data Backup
Business Disruption
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has forced businesses worldwide to re-examine their business continuity plans, including policies around data backup. Further, a surge in the number of natural disasters and security threats in the last few years has made it imperative for businesses to have a plan that enables them to reduce business risks, decrease downtime, and restore operations quickly in the event of a disruption.
While a business disruption affects businesses of all sizes, the impact is particularly devastating for small and medium-sized firms. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) of the US Government recently reported that “almost 40% of small businesses never reopen their doors following a disaster.” Even if they do, 90% fail within a year unless they are able to resume operations within five days. This underscores how crucial it is to restarting business operations rapidly after a disaster.
A robust data backup strategy is fundamental in ensuring quick recovery from any business disruption. It is all the more critical if one considers the rapidly increasing cost and the impact of system downtime. The average cost of an unplanned IT downtime is $5,600 per minute, according to a Gartner study.
Why Data Backup Needs to be Part of Your Core
Data backup is similar to putting your precious asset in a bank locker and securing it. Not only does it give peace of mind, but it is also accessible whenever needed. Even so, one in five businesses doesn’t have a data backup and disaster recovery plan. Here’s why you cannot afford not to have one:
Minimize Losses by Maintaining Business Continuity
Downtime or business disruption can cost anywhere between US$10,000 for small business to US$5 million per hour for larger enterprises. These large numbers explain why several companies don’t survive a disaster. Having a backup of your data, apps, and processes means that you can drastically cut down your downtime, retrieve your data, and be up and running as quickly as possible.
Preserve Brand Value and Customer Relationships
The actual cost of downtime is more than just monetary loss. It damages employee morale. This has a domino effect that brings down productivity, takes away your ability to serve customers, impacts your customers’ experience, and spoils relationships built over the years. Once customers and employees lose faith in the company, it invariably tarnishes the reputation of the brand.
The impact of business disruption is hard to quantify. One of the most well-known examples of data outages is that of TSB Bank in 2018. It impacted several thousands of their customers and forced its Chief Executive, Paul Pester, to resign. This outage resulted from a switchover from the computer servers of its former owner, Lloyd Banking Group, to its new owner, Sabadell. Another incident is Sony’s outage as a result of a cyberattack that lasted 23 days and resulted in a loss of a staggering US$250 million, as well as millions of angry customers.
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Safeguarding Data in the Cloud
An increasing number of organizations are opting for cloud storage to back up their data assets. Security in the cloud is just as critical as the security of the data stored locally. One of the best ways to ensure this is to encrypt the data when it is moving to and from the cloud and when it rests in the cloud. Parablu’s leading-edge BluKrypt technology provides robust data protection while in transit and at rest. It ensures data is encrypted, versioned, searchable, and fully auditable, enabling end-to-end data privacy and security.
Adherence to Compliance Requirements
With the stipulation of GDPR, data protection and data management have taken precedence, making data backup strategy imperative for businesses. A secure, impenetrable backup is fundamental for GDPR compliance. BluKrypt can move backup copies securely from endpoints to the cloud, as well as provide detailed audit logs and activity reports to stay compliant with regulations such as HIPAA, SOX, ISO, HITACH, NYDFS, and GDPR.
Build Business Resilience
Possibly, the most crucial benefit of data backup is that it helps organizations build IT resilience and reliability. It not only ensures business continuity in the face of a disaster but also helps you better address IT glitches, human errors, migration failures, and cyberattacks. It won’t be an overstatement to say that robust backups help enterprises bring down IT downtime and enhance business efficiency.
The consequences of a disaster event can range from financial to reputation loss. In some cases, it becomes tough to bounce back from an event. In this scenario, enterprises of all sizes, big or small, need to plan for a disaster and data backup is a crucial part of any disaster recovery strategy. It can prevent costly interruptions, build resilience, ensure regulatory compliance, build security measures, build and maintain strong customer relations, and ensure your brand reputation is untainted. Need we say more?
