Mother Nature is unpredictable, especially in Texas. It’s not uncommon for temperatures to swing from the 40s into the 80s within a single day. Or to experience clear skies one minute, thunderstorms the next, then back to blazing hot and sunny within an hour’s time. In fact, there’s a phrase most Texans are very fond of saying: “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes – it’ll change.”
Why is Texas weather so unstable? Well, for one, there are cold and hot fronts coming from both sides of the continent fairly frequently. Secondly, the state is relatively flat. There aren’t any mountains or large bodies of water to mediate changes in temperature. A quick Google search will yield a variety of other theories, but the point is, Texas weather is frequently in flux.
Just as you can’t always accurately predict Texas weather, you can’t typically predict disasters. You can, however, prepare for them.
Enter BDR. Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) is a plan that protects your company’s data and maintains business continuity in the face of a small hiccup or a huge catastrophe. Whether your business is affected by a natural disaster, has a massive software or hardware failure, or human error strikes, a BDR plan can help minimize the damage and save your business major consequences.
Now that you have a basic understanding of what it is, let’s delve a little deeper into BDR’s individual parts.
Business Continuity
A term often associated with BDR is Business Continuity. Business continuity is a plan that ensures a company can continue operation in the face of a disruptive incident. This strategy takes into account contingency (a plan of action), redundancy (backup), and resilience (adaptation speed).
Downtime can cost SMBs up to $8,600 per hour and is brought on by a variety of different instances: power outages, equipment failure, rolling blackouts, etc. Whether processes are compromised for several hours or several days, it’s important to have a business continuity strategy in place to avoid hindering productivity, limiting service to customers and wasting valuable resources.
Backup
The backup part of BDR is exactly what it sounds like: backing up your data. A good rule of thumb is to keep your sensitive information backed up in multiple places by following the 3-2-1 backup rule. Have 3 copies of your data located on 2 different kinds of storage solutions with 1 stored offsite. While it may take a bit longer to restore your data from an offsite location, it’s better than losing it entirely.
Disaster Recovery
A disaster recovery plan takes into account business operations and continuity needs, determining which applications are most important to keep the organization up and running. “68% of SMB owners don’t have a disaster recovery plan,” and that’s a shame, especially when the likelihood of a business failing after a disaster is fairly great. When disasters happen, natural or man-made, it’s key to have processes in place to keep your business operating (even if it’s not at full capacity). If you aren’t functioning, you aren’t generating income, and if that goes on for too long, your business will break down.
As shared in our previous blog post, the Death Star didn’t have a disaster recovery plan and suffered dearly as a result. Don’t let your business meet the same fate as the Death Star. Plan accordingly.
Next Steps
A solid BDR plan combines backup and data recovery strategies that ensure your business can continue operating in the event of a setback, large or small. Throughout the horror that was Hurricane Harvey, not a single one of our clients lost any data. In terms of BDR, we consider that a resounding success.
We’d love the opportunity to work with you and create a strategy that will keep your business up and running in the event of a disaster. While we don’t wish such tragedies on anyone, it’s best to be prepared if they arise.