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If employees cannot access files or applications to do their work, organizations feel the pain of lost revenue and low employee morale. It may also be felt by clients, vendors and prospects who may question the organization’s fitness.
Online calculators can help you estimate the cost of downtime for your organization. Roughly, an organization with twenty-five employees and an average revenue/employee of $100/hour means a $2,500 loss per hour of downtime. If your organization has 10TB of data backed up locally, the backup might take 40 hours to be restored. That means the cost of the downtime is $2,500 x 40 = $100,000.
And this is why business continuity as we talk about it in the IT world has been so highly prized. There are many reasons for unwanted downtime: accidental or malicious data deletion, damage to physical devices and poor security practices. A business-continuity mindset drives an organization to be up and running in spite of these obstacles.
The More Data, the Longer the Restoration
Our dependence on digital solutions is only growing.
- Google now puts AI above all other answers, pushing your employees to depend on it.
- Remember the lawyers sanctioned by the judge a year ago for citing AI-“hallucinated” precedent? Dependence is a growing issue.
- My art-school-teacher neighbor says it’s frustrating that students don’t think for themselves but rush to chatbots for answers.
And we thought we depended on our machines before. The availability of generative AI will make downtime even more costly going forward as we integrate these AI-generated solutions into our datasets. For example, AI-analysis and modeling accumulate on your storage much faster than similar activities by humans. As the datasets grow, the backup and restoration scheme must keep up.
Virtualization
Until recently only large organizations could afford a data center on standby, so that when its working data was compromised, the organization could change to a duplicate server (think of the worldwide redundancy of Google servers). But with the Cloud and virtualization your organization can accomplish much the same, so your employees will not have to wait for a complete restoration before they are working on their files again. As data grows, spinning up a temporary virtual server becomes more important.
Local and Cloud Backups
Do you have local and cloud backup? In other words, do you have a backup for your backup? For instance, a fire can take out a server and its local backup. A fire can similarly take out an offsite data center. Having three sets of data and one offsite is a sound idea.
Up to the Task?
Do you have data restoration that can meet different kinds of challenges? Cloud backup is good, but depending on the types and volume of data, local backup typically wins for full-restore times. And while the restoration is happening, can your employees continue to work on a virtual machine? And is the virtual machine local or in the Cloud? There are advantages to either or both.
Data Immutability
One of the reasons Bryley favors Datto’s backup is its data-immutability feature. Your data is stored so it cannot be altered by external operations. This is an important feature in the era of ransomware encryption. Today some ransomware is smart enough to first look for backups and encrypt them. Datto’s data immutability scheme was designed to thwart these and data-deletion attacks.
Assessments
But business continuity is not a product. It’s a way of thinking about minimizing the threat of downtime. That’s why we have the Business Continuity pyramid. No solution is right for every organization. Bryley advocates beginning with assessments for a clear picture of your as-is state so you can make informed decisions about what vulnerabilities need to be addressed with what urgency. Out of assessments comes a plan of attack, or defense in this case.
Backup Frequency and Is This Thing On?
How often do you back up? What is the most recent backed-up state of your files? If you had to revert to the backed-up files what would it be like to reconstruct the data after that point? How long would it take to reconstruct a week’s data? A month’s?
And last but not least, how often is your backup tested as though you’re recovering from a disaster? Do you test that your employees know how to perform their assigned roles in a restoration? You can’t know about the reliability of the backup unless it’s periodically tested.
From a Different Angle
A fresh set of eyes from an independent IT organization helps show what the current IT team may not have the perspective to see. So consider a complimentary 15-minute consult with Roy Pacitto to explore approaches to business continuity that would be suitable for your organization. You may also contact Roy at ITExperts@Bryley.com or 978.562.6077 x2.