Disaster Survival: Why Business Continuity Matters

With hurricane season in full swing, fires burning in the west, and plenty of other potential disasters ready to strike, your business is always at risk. Add in ransomware and malware threats and business continuity should be every company’s concern.Making sure your business can keep running—or restart quickly—in the face of these threats is critical. How critical? According to a recent ITIC survey 40 percent of enterprises saying that a single hour of downtime can cost from $1 million to $5 million—without including legal fees, fines, or penalties. That’s why business continuity preparation has to be a priority for every company.

Make a Plan

The first step in ensuring your company’s survival is to have a business continuity plan in place. According to FEMA, at a high level that plan should include:

• Physical location evacuation plans that ensure employee safety
• Communications plans so you can notify employees, customers, and other key partners and personnel
• Redundancy for critical resources like power, equipment, and supplies

What About Your Data?

While all of the above actions are critical, FEMA makes no mention of data protection. But today most companies depend on their data for survival—losing your data in a disaster makes your company all the more likely to end up as one of those statistics quoted above. Not good. Fortunately, there are plenty of strategies you can put in place to keep your data safe. At StorageCraft we recommend our own take on the 3-2-1 backup rule. Also, make sure your backup and disaster recovery plan is up to date.

One Solution, Complete Protection

One of the simplest ways to ensure business continuity is with StorageCraft ShadowXafe. ShadowXafe is a next-gen software solution that gives your business complete data protection, best-in-industry data recovery, and easy scalability so it can grow with your needs. Most important, ShadowXafe is easy to deploy and manage, while ensuring your data is secure, application downtime is minimized, and your people can get back to work as soon as possible. ShadowXafe offers host- or agent-based data protection that delivers dependable, complete physical and virtual system backup and disaster recovery. In fact, with ShadowXafe you can backup images as virtual machines in seconds, and even recover your data to dissimilar hardware or virtual environments. And, because ShadowXafe features a single management workflow for data protection and disaster recovery, it’s simple to manage and maintain.

Options for SMBs with Simpler Environments

StorageCraft also offers options that help small and medium-sized businesses survive disasters by recovering quickly, too. Check out StorageCraft® OneXafe® Solo®, a plug-and-play appliance that streams data directly to StorageCraft Cloud Services for business continuity.

Conclusion

Whether you choose ShadowXafe, one of StorageCraft’s other powerful backup and disaster recovery solutions, or any other solution that’s available in the market, what’s important is that you put one in place today. Schedule a custom demo with a StorageCraft engineer to learn more about how you can make sure your business survives any disaster that comes your way.