MSPNetworks Blog

A disaster can take many forms, from a raging snowstorm to deleting the wrong file. Regardless of what kind of disaster you face, you can know that it doesn’t take much to impact a business, especially if the business doesn’t have a business continuity plan in place. How does your business recover from such a devastating scenario? How can it get its data back and in proper working order? That’s what we want to tell you about today.

The Value of Infonomics

There is value in your business’ data, whether you realize it or not. The value itself depends on what you collect and who it’s from, whether it’s from vendors, clients, employees, or otherwise, but there is always value in what you store. Infonomics is the process of assigning a monetary value to the data so you have a better understanding of how much you lose when you suffer a data loss incident. Ask yourself these questions to determine the value of your data:

• How much capital would replacing the data cost? 
• How much and what percentage is your organization’s data?
• What kind of revenue could your organization see if it were to buy and sell it? 
• What will it cost to completely protect the data?

With these questions in mind, you should be able to determine the true loss you can associate with data disasters. To help you further gauge the impact of your data loss, let’s look at some deeper concepts you should know regarding your data loss scenario.

Data Backup

Obviously you need data backup in order to get back to work following a data loss incident. Many companies utilize comprehensive data backup systems that take snapshots of their data throughout the workday. This provides you with a tool to revert back to your infrastructure at any pivotal moments when data would be damaged or corrupted so you can hopefully dodge the ramifications of it.

MSPNetworks is of the mind that backup and disaster recovery systems should take incremental backups throughout the day and deploy to both a local network-attached device and secure, remote data center. This allows for total data redundancy that will ensure your data loss is minimal.

Disaster Recovery

The actual act of recovering data comes down to disaster recovery, which is a bit different compared to data backup. Data recovery is when you have a plan to deploy your backup in the hopes that you never have to actually use it. Here are some of the factors that contribute to a disaster recovery platform:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - The amount of time that your core business processes can be interrupted before your business begins to fail.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - The amount of time your business can withstand interruption before it can be considered a complete break in continuity. 

You’ll want to ensure that you reach for specific metrics for both according to your business’ operations. The closer you can get these metrics, the better, as you don’t want to take any chances with your disaster recovery or business continuity. After all, each moment spent wasted during this process is a moment that could send your business hurtling toward destruction.

MSPNetworks can help your business implement the smartest data backup and disaster recovery solutions on the market. To learn more, call us today at (516) 403-9001.

Data recovery is a major pain point for small businesses, but not all organizations have the same resources and assets that make it possible. Small businesses in particular are more prone to forego data backup and disaster recovery because it does not provide an immediate return on investment. Well, we’re here to tell you that this mindset is wrong.

In a lot of ways, having data recovery for your business is kind of like insurance; you want to have it in case an emergency strikes, as the disaster could potentially be more devastating than paying for the service itself. Think about it like this; does it actually hurt your business to have data backup and disaster recovery?

We’re here to walk you through some important information to consider for your own data backup and disaster recovery solution. You want to focus on two specific areas for your disaster recovery solution: how much data you need to restore, also known as the recovery point objective (RPO), and how long it takes to recover that data, or recovery time objective (RTO).

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

Our earlier explanation is a bit simplistic, in all actuality. Recovery point objective is more clearly defined as the maximum age of files that need to be restored in the event of a disaster in order to resume normal operations. The RPO is expressed in days, hours, minutes, and even seconds moving into the past from the moment of the data loss incident. RPO also takes into account how often backups are taken and when.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

As explained earlier, RTO involves how long the process of data recovery takes to get you back to a place where normal operations can resume. You generally want to shoot for a minimum amount of downtime for something like this to reduce wasted resources. Depending on how much data you have to restore, RTO might take some time. This is why RTO is often staggered into steps starting with the most critical of data. From there, data that is less important can be restored over a longer period of time, based on how necessary it is to get back to normal operations.

Both RPO and RTO play significant roles in helping your organization determine the best path forward in the event of a disaster. If you are not sure how to approach either of these requirements, we have just the solution.

Does your business need a hand with implementing a comprehensive data backup and disaster recovery plan? MSPNetworks can equip you with a BDR solution designed for maximum data restoration and minimal downtime. To learn more, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.