The statistics show that downtime, data loss or a disaster (natural, human error or a malicious attack) can cripple your business. Are UK business leaders prepared?
1) In a study of UK business leaders, nearly 50% of respondents said that their backups were kept on a separate system within the same office - indicating a troubling lack of disaster recovery plans.
2) 41% of UK businesses have either failed to test their disaster recovery (DR) systems in the last six months or don’t know when any sort of testing last took place. (Source)
3) In one study of business leaders in Europe and North America, nearly 30% of them had lost revenues due to network outages.
4) The average cost of downtime across all industry sectors is approximately £4,330 / $5,600! (Source)
5) In a survey of MSPs, 96% said that clients fully recover from an attack if they have a reliable backup and disaster recovery solution in place.
Downtime, lost data and all types of disasters can threaten your peace of mind, not just your profits.
Backup-as-a-Service offers you a fully-managed, monitored and secure online method for protecting critical data. BaaS helps to mitigate human error risks by regularly replicating your files to encrypted servers in a secure, off-site location. This way, you can quickly restore files as and when you need to, without searching through various hard-drives and experiencing that horrible sinking-stomach feeling when you realise the files are lost or corrupted.
A disaster recovery plan incorporates the processes, people and overarching components required to swiftly restore your IT systems to normal operations when any threats arise.
Unfortunately, many businesses treat their backup processes and disaster recovery plan as 'shelfware' to set up and then leave to run in the background without a second thought.
You don't want to wait until your systems are down or data is lost to discover that your DR plan doesn't actually meet your needs. In addition to helping you meet compliance standards, testing your DR plan annually will ensure that you can restore your systems to their current status, not to an outdated version.
A successful DR plan will equip your business with a cost effective means of replicating your critical IT systems to an enterprise class secondary location. It is tested frequently and can scale with your business as your needs evolve.