January 26, 2016

Backup vs. Business Continuity Plan

Backup is not equal Business Continuity

Traditional backup methods, such disk drive or online backup service are no longer sufficient. In fact, leading edge companies  are finding such solutions inadequate, due to their inherent inability to recover data quickly and mitigate down times. Recent technological innovations have established new comprehensive standard called Intelligent Business Continuity (IBC). Only an IBC solution will ensure:

  • data protection
  • data security
  • instant recovery
  • downtime mitigation
  • comprehensive business continuity

Business continuity isn’t just about keeping backups. Being able to recover from a total system disaster instantaneously – that’s business continuity.

In the era of ubiquitous and affordable cloud storage and backup solutions offered by giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft prices only continue to drop as competition for market share intensifies.  However, unless the deployed solutions are capable of handling 24×7 monitoring, backup verification and proper continuity planning, along with rapid data recovery, they can only be considered a backup – not a true business continuity.

Backup vs. Business Continuity

BackupBusiness Continuity
Local Protection
YesYes
Cloud Protection
SometimesYes
Restore Applications
SometimesYes
Instant Local/Cloud Failover
NoYes
Ability to Prevent Downtime
NoYes
Typical Recovery TimeHours to DaysSeconds to Minutes

Your organization’s data and availability of critical IT systems is very important.

In the event of a primary system failure, can your organization trust that its onsite backup solution will work the way it should?

Even if you do trust your current backup solution, what will your organization do in the event that its IT systems are utterly destroyed due to fire, flooding or some other calamity?

If your server sustains total crash and an e-commerce website get comprised and it goes offline for hours, what will the financial impact be on your organization?

And what if hospital EMR system is inaccessible or healthcare facility and patient records (including PHI) are lost due to ransomware attack, how will the care providers administer proper care?

Kontech’s Intelligent Business Continuity solutions are tailored to address the aforesaid concerns and ensure that your organization has access to its important files and systems at all times.

Just a few years back, backing up all of critical files on a portable drive or running a complete backup to a network attached storage (NAS) daily was considered an effective backup strategy. Nowadays though, these practices are simply obsolete. Businesses and their clients have grown to expect and demand 24×7×365 up-time, system availability and data accessibility, and if your organization isn’t outfitted to support true business continuity after unexpected downtime, you’re likely to sustain monetary loses and/or lose your competitive edge.

You can actually calculate how much time it would take you and how much dollars the recovery and system downtime can cost you. Click on the downtime and recovery time cost calculator and you will be amazed.

Organizations across nearly all verticals today cannot afford to leave their data to chance and an effective business continuity planning is a must, do or die – for some. For those organizations without dedicated IT staff or otherwise unable to manage the process themselves, MSPs like Kontech are here to assist with business continuity strategy, instant virtualization and disaster recovery services.

Contact us to learn how we can help with designing an intelligent business continuity plan.