Off-site Backups: a Critical Component for Business Resiliency

While many of us know that having an off-site backup solution is crucial, there are still individuals who believe that having a local backup is just enough–whether it be a backup for a physical server, an on-premise cloud environment, or even a public or private cloud. Those individuals typically forget the potential for losing that data and having the inability to use it. Whether you’re an IT Administrator, an IT Manager, or CIO, the last discussion you want to have with an executive team is, “the backups we have aren’t useable.”

According to Iron Mountain, data loss is up 400% since 2012. Of course, we can attribute that to a multitude of situations. As the years have gone by, we’ve moved more data from paper to physical disks. Then, we developed the raid theory, assuming that solved data loss. Today, we of course have the pleasure of utilizing solid state drives, which for most of us, we believe they won’t fail or that they’ll have a longer life span. However, you would be shocked to hear that in some tests, after 4 years, 20% of solid state drives experience uncorrectable errors, which is much higher than standard HDD, according to ESF. Let’s not get into the fact that SSDs can cost you anywhere from $0.20 per GB to more than $1.00 per GB, and a traditional HDD can cost you less than $0.025 per GB. Yes, that’s a zero in front of the twenty-five. That comes to 1/4 of a cent, which is pretty impressive for a slower, but more reliable and cheaper solution.

However, that really isn’t the fix, is it? Let’s not forget the fact that whether we use HDDs in a raid or SSDs in a raid with as many fault tolerant drives as we want, our data loss potential isn’t fixed. We can lose data for more reasons than we can count:

• The raid failed and the data within the raid is unrecoverable. Yes, raids fail! Even if your drives didn’t fail, the raid could become corrupt and all data can be lost. Trust me, I’ve seen it!
• Oops, one of your employees was tasked with upgrading your server and forgot to take a snapshot or backup. The upgrade wiped the disk, or even better, someone reformatted the disk thinking they had a proper backup. 
• Uh oh, the day of doom. Your payroll or accounting server crashed and all the data is corrupt, so your team decided to restore from a backup. However, it turns out that this morning the IT team forgot to tell anyone that all of your backups over the last few days had been failing or corrupted from a backup server crash, and well, now, you don’t have backups.

When giving you these examples of data loss and backup issues, our intentions were not to scare you but to give you real-world scenarios that showcase the importance of having off-site backups. Off-site backups are as critical to your business as generators are to a hospital. As businesses, we always need to be online and we need our data when we need it. Our users and customers have so many options, so to set ourselves apart, we need to ensure uptime and, of course, quality service. 

Whether it be an employee making a mistake, Ransomware plaguing our systems, our on-premise systems being physically destroyed or, of course–the term we constantly hear–a disaster, it’s no question that we always need our data!

According to Small Business Trends, 58% of businesses have no backup plan for data loss. This then alludes to a statistic that 60% of companies that experience data loss typically shut down within six months. Essentially, the takeaway from those statistics is as follows: if you don’t have a robust, effective backup plan, you may become part of the 60% of businesses that fail as a result of data loss. Following best backup practices such as a 3-2-1 method and having off-site backups will allow for the utmost resiliency when it comes to your recovery plan, and it will protect your data from almost every potential possibility of data loss. 

Opti9 provides several solutions for data protection, resiliency, and recovery to ensure your business remains online and accessible. Utilizing top-of-the-line infrastructure and systems, Opti9 can help businesses architect, develop, and ensure your data protection.

Want to learn more about how Opti9’s Disaster Recovery as-a-Service (DRaaS), Off-site Backups-as-a-Service (BaaS), and Ransomware Recovery-as-a-Service (RRaaS) offerings can help solidify your organization’s resiliency strategy? Give us a call at 1-866-932-2471 or send us a message at sales@Opti9.com and speak to a representative today.