You’ve shed blood, sweat, and tears building your business and developing a customer database. You have collected useful data from as long as you can remember that has made your business profitable in the first place. However, what if you showed up at your place of work one day to find that your computer systems crashed and burned over night. Creating a backup plan for your data before such an event occurs can help you to avoid such disasters.
Know Where to Put Your Faith, Hope and Trust
Even cloud backup software isn’t completely perfect. The reason for this is that some cloud storage solutions lack incremental backups, also known as historical backups. With some storage solutions that are based off of a cloud you only have access to the most recent copy, which means you aren’t able to pull up any data that you had in the past. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t trust cloud storage solutions; simply that you should know the full capabilities of the technology before you invest and trust your business data to the cloud providers.
With any kind of backup software it’s best that you know your full range of options, what advantages and disadvantages they each have, how secure the software is and if that software suppports your small business needs and requirements. Finally, you’ll also want to find out what you can expect in the instance that you actually have to access and use your backup data.
Be Proactive
Just because yours is a small business doesn’t mean that you don’t have a lot to lose by a sudden loss of data. While many small business owners know that data backup should be a top priority, many of them still put it off. How much downtime and loss of business would your company have to endure if there were a sudden outage? As a small business even the smallest loss can seriously add up and impact your profits.
It’s best that you overestimate the damage that can be done from a computer crash, lost device or a natural disaster. You might also want to think about having more than one backup of all of your business’ important files and data. The reason for this is that even if something were to happen to one of the backups you’d still have another to rely on.
Backup Exercises
If you actually were to lose your data, what would you need to access first and how fast would you need to be able to access it? There are now several ways for you to access data, including PC, tablet, laptop and phone. Do you have a preference for retrieving data? If so, you might want to find a backup program that allows you to access your data on various devices.
If a natural disaster were to demolish all of your servers, you might want to access your data from your smartphone. Something else to think about with this situation is that your employees might not be located in the same area or unable to come in for work, so you’d need a way to connect with them so that business can continue as smoothly as possible. Under these circumstances, your best bet might be to go with cloud computer storage.
Small businesses and big businesses should both simply see themselves as businesses and address their data backup needs accordingly. Data disasters don’t care how large or small you are when they strike, you still have something to lose.
Presented by NovaStor
