Hurricane Season officially began on June 1st and will run thru November 30th. The National Hurricane Center stated recently that they expect more hurricanes than normal in the Atlantic region. But even if you don’t live along the East or Gulf Coasts, a significant outbreak of severe weather that swept through the Mountain West, Great Plains, Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Northeast just before Memorial Day brings one fact into sharp focus: businesses big and small must be prepared with backup and disaster preparedness solutions that protect data, systems, and employees.
It’s not just hurricanes that can cause damage – tornadoes can generate large rain falls, hail, landslides, and high winds. For tornadoes, it’s not just the wind that causes the damage, it’s the change in air pressure that can cause buildings to explode.
That’s why concerns about data protection and data backup are so critical and important. Here are some statistical information for your review:
•The Small Business Administration estimates that nearly 75% of businesses don’t have a reliable disaster recovery plan, while more than 80% don’t have natural disaster insurance and 70% don’t have access to a back-up generator.
•The Bureau of Labor reports that 20% of businesses experience a natural disaster-related disaster — and that 80% of those businesses will go under within two years. Insurance underwriters also estimate that less than 10% of medium-sized companies that suffer catastrophic data loss ever recover, while 40% never reopen and upwards of 50% close within two years of the disaster.
•Hurricane Sandy, which devastated parts of New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut in 2012, led to an estimated $20 billion in lost economic activity, not to mention the millions of homes and lives directly affected.
•In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, a survey of 100 small business owners in the New York Tri-State area conducted by Wakefield Research found that more than 65% had still not created a disaster plan — and that another 65% were not backing up all of their business data.
•The survey also revealed that 75% of small businesses back up their data electronically, but of those, 60% used disaster-vulnerable on-site technology such as external hard drives and servers.
•More than 50% of all small business owners have not designated an alternative location to operate from in case their workplace is impacted by a disaster.
•Business surveys indicate that nearly 95% of PCs are not adequately backed up.
So, now comes the hard question – what are you doing to protect yourselves and your businesses? You need to be working with a trusted IT vendor to help you with the protection of your data.
Remember to:
1Backup your data by a regular backup using an off-site solution. The local backup won’t help if it was damaged in the tornado or hurricane.
2Develop a Business Continuity Plan to allow you to work in another location, should your primary location be damaged an uninhabitable. Share this plan with all of your employees. How will your employees get their work done? Now is the best time to plan for this event.
3Implement and test the Business Continuity Plan.
So, you need to have a high quality backup solution in place. Whether that is using a cloud-based product (Carbonite, Crash Plan, Datto, Mozy) or a solution proposed for your business by your IT Vendor. Backing up when you think of it to a flash drive or external hard drive, is not adequate any more. If you choose to back up to an local device, you should have a cloud-based product as the primary and the local backup as a secondary solution.
Elite Networking & Consulting offers their clients a cloud-based software product that backs up data in real-time. We can verify that your data is actually being backed up without visiting your office. This is the benefit of working with an IT professional.
If you would like additional information on the security products offered by Elite Networking & Consulting, please either call us at 855-767-9685, ext. 700 or send an email to service1@elite-nac.com.