As people who live along the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard know, hurricane season is in full swing. For residents there, checking flashlight batteries and having sheets of plywood ready to cover windows are annual rites. But when a major storm system does loom on the horizon, there’s still an inevitable swirl of commotion as people near the sea head for safer habitats. Perhaps forgotten in concern for personal safety are thoughts of company financial records and business data. While skies and minds are clear, it may be a good time to start a conversation with your customers about their business continuity plans.
Even if your market is far from any body of water larger than a duck pond, there’s still no time like the present for talking to unprotected customers about a backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solution. In addition to fires, floods and other catastrophes (natural or man-made), server crashes have been known to occur in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and all of Canada.
The Compelling Case for Business Continuity Planning
Business continuity planning (BCP) should be seen as necessity by owners of small and midsized businesses (SMBs). According to a study by the Gartner Group, 43 percent of companies were immediately put out of business by a “major loss” of computer records, and another 51 percent permanently closed their doors within two years — leaving a mere six percent survival rate.
In devising a BCP, business owners need to consider and address:
- Risk of losing vital business data, such as customer records
- Industry regulatory compliance requirements such as the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) as well as other local, state and federal laws
- Environmental hazards to business infrastructure
- Time necessary to recover if disaster strikes
- What happens if you don’t have a business continuity plan in place
Though data loss may be catastrophic, the expense of optimal, in-house BCP strategies and solutions are beyond the budgets of many smaller businesses. The challenge comes in finding an affordable BDR solution that will perform the following:
- Be relatively easy to implement and maintain
- Provide quick restore or recovery times
- Be able to restore files, emails or attachments
- Ensure all backed-up data is encrypted and otherwise kept safe
- Restore backed-up data to different kinds of servers in the event of catastrophe
- Continue data backup even during active recovery phases
- Monitor and manage ongoing data backup processes so failures can be diagnosed and remedied before adversely impacting the BCP lifecycle
And most importantly, the BDR solution should enable an organization to get back to business within minutes rather than hours or days after a system failure.
Finding Solutions
Not by coincidence, Zenith Infotech works closely with MSPs and VARs on business continuity. In minutes, Zenith Infotech’s business continuity solution can restore files, file folders, emails, or email attachments. In addition, if a server crashes, you can perform a manual failover to the BDR device in approximately 15 minutes. Sold under your own brand, this reasonably priced, all-encompassing solution includes:
- Frequent full, block-level backups
- Standby server virtualization
- Bare metal restorations to dissimilar hardware
- Optional Offsite Storage
With Zenith backup and disaster recovery solution, you can easily and profitably provide your customers with secure, effective and affordable protection for their irreplaceable business records. Visit us to learn more.
Note: Maurice Saluan is VP-Channel Management for Zenith Infotech as well as seasoned sales veteran in the managed service arena. Guest blog entries such as this one are contributed on a monthly basis as part of MSPmentor.net’s 2009 Platinum sponsorship. Find all of Saluan’s blog entries here.
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Maurice,
That is a great statistic from Gartner. Do you have access to a link or something for the original source? I would love to reference this statistic in my next DR presentation.
Thanks,
David Dempsey
http://www.managed-data.com
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The biggest problem with most small businesses is getting them to see the fact that they really may face this kind of failure and that they probably won’t make it if they don’t have a plan. But most entrepreneurs are risk takers and need hard facts and examples to get them to move. I have always used a statement about failure in my presentations, but it wasn’t backed up by anyone. I would love to know where the Gartner stats are so that I can use them to improve my BDR pitch.
Dave and Robert,
Thanks for your commeents.
These are stats included in a paid Gartner publication by Dave Russell. 2007. “Recovery will move to disk-based, manager of managers approach by 2011″ Gartner Group. http://www.gartner.com.
In addition, here are more stats you can use:
1. 93% of companies that lost their data for 10 days or more filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster, and 50% filed for bankruptcy immediately. (Source: National Archives & Records Administration in Washington.)
2. 20% of small to medium businesses will suffer a major disaster causing loss of critical data every 5 years. (Source: Richmond House Group)
3. This year, 40% of small to medium businesses that manage their own network and use the Internet for more than e-mail will have their network accessed by a hacker, and more than 50% won’t even know they were attacked. (Source: Gartner Group)
4. About 70% of business people have experienced (or will experience) data loss due to accidental deletion, disk or system failure, viruses, fire or some other disaster (Source: Carbonite, an online backup service)
5. The first reaction of employees who lose their data is to try to recover the lost data themselves by using recovery software or either restarting or unplugging their computer — steps that can make later data recovery impossible. (Source: 2005 global survey by Minneapolis-based Ontrack Data Recovery)
Obviously I can’t spell “comments”.
Maurice,
Thanks for your response.
perhaps this is another discussion all together, but I too have seen stat number 1 quoted all over the place, and I’ve used it myself. When I tried to find the original source, I couldn’t, basically everyone was quoting each other it seemed. I did find some stuff saying that that stat might not be credible. I still have it in my marketing material, but I’m considering removing it because I haven’t been able to confirm the source directly from the National Archives & Records Administration, and I want to make sure I’ve checked my facts. If anyone has a link to this particular stat, please post it! I think being able to reference the original URL definately adds some punch to the stats.
Thanks also for the other stats, those are great!
Dave Dempsey
http://www.managed-data.com