We’ve all seen the commercials featuring Mayhem, a bruised and battered Dean Winters in a disheveled grey suit, impersonating everything from a texting and driving teenage girl to a fiberglass-chewing raccoon. Always around him is some scene of … well … mayhem, be it a wrecked car, a house on fire, or flooding — all of which he causes.
As fun and entertaining as these ads are, they all point to one sobering truth, as one commercial so succinctly states: Mayhem has been and always will be everywhere. In the light of this, here are four reasons you should invest in an offsite data backup system now.
-
Oklahoma weather. 'Nuff said. Three years ago, many of our associates from our corporate office in Oklahoma City watched either on TV or from their very homes as a tornado laid waste to Moore, carving a path of destruction two miles wide and 22 miles long, leaving 13,000 homes, perhaps hundreds of businesses and at least two public schools splintered and strewn apart in its wake. How many businesses lost everything, including their data? Who knows? And that's just a tornado. We're not even talking about the grassfires, flooding and earthquakes ... and escaped tigers.
-
Stuff happens. Sometimes the disasters aren’t weather or nature-related, but while smaller — coming in the form of things like theft, fire, pipe-bursts and network crashes — they can be nearly as destructive. Sure, you may have built redundancy into your office, perhaps adding a back-up server, but if a tornado strikes, a flood swamps, a pipe bursts or a gas line explodes your back-up will be just as useless as the server.
-
Downtime is painfully expensive. According to one Gartner statistic, the unplanned downtime whether due to a natural or technical disaster, can damage a business to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars — the cost of downtime due to loss of data or a network outage estimated to $42,000 an hour. That's just downtime. We're not even talking about any kind of equipment or other physical damage that may have occured when your network went down.
-
Malicious technophile geek pirates ... or whatever want to call them. By now, you've probably heard about viruses (or is it viri?), like Cryptolocker or more recently Locky, that infect networks through a clicked link or, as in the latter case, a macro on a Word document, encrypting all the files present and making them inaccessible until a ransom is paid. In many cases, even after the ransom is paid, the files are still lost.
So, alluding to another now popular bit of pop-culture, that is why we are warning you, "Spring is coming." Time to prepare.
The best way to prepare your data for any disaster, whether that be a wide-spread natural phenomenon, a network failure, a Locky infection or a localized zombie apocalypse (white walkers maybe?) is to implement a dependable backup, disaster recovery solution — one located far offsite and one that can get you back up and running immediately following the disaster. With one of these systems, all one has to do is in essence go to the backup and in it access a time before the catastrophe and reset the system with that data. Done. Disaster over — at least for your business info. It's that simple.
To learn how R.K. Black, Inc.’s IT team can implement a BDR system through our technology partner Datto and a data backup center more than 50 miles away from OKC, ensuring your data is safe and your downtime minimal, click the button below.
