How a Disaster Recovery Cloud Backup Could Save Your Business

You never thought it would happen to you. Disaster struck and now your business is in jeopardy because a natural disaster has destroyed all of your equipment. The result? You can’t recover backups, and the data that your business runs on is gone, leaving you to pick up the pieces. This may sound dramatic, but it’s not fiction. 2020 has been a record-breaking year for natural disasters. The threat of losing crucial data due to wildfires, hurricanes, and floods is very real. Plus, climate scientists expect the strength of storms to continue to grow. It’s time to face the fact that having a local backup isn’t enough. Adding disaster recovery cloud backup to your data protection mix is essential because it can protect your business in four key ways.

Data Backup Redundancy

When you use cloud backups, you’ll be replicating your local backups to a secure, offsite data center. But the physical location of that data matters. If your data is stored in a data center in the same city as your office, it’s susceptible to the same natural disasters. That’s why vendors like StorageCraft store data in geographically disparate regions of the country. Even if a disaster impacts your area, your backups are safely stored far from danger.

Mirroring for Extra Protection

For highly sensitive data, many businesses not only store data in a single cloud location, they also mirror that data to another location. That ensures your data is safely stored in two completely separate data centers, helping further ensure that Mother Nature, hardware failure, or accidental corruption won’t cause you to lose your data.

Backup Monitoring and Testing

It’s easy to take backups. Just set a schedule and let them do their thing, right? Wrong. Though it rarely happens, backups can fail due to connection issues and other problems. When you’re replicating offsite, backups can likewise fail to reach their destination should your internet connection fail. That’s why it’s critical for admins to monitor backups and replication so they can ensure that critical equipment was backed up and that backups reached their replication targets. Sophisticated disaster recovery clouds like StorageCraft Cloud Services let admins remotely monitor and even test backups, so they can be positive that data is ready for recovery whenever it's needed.

The All-Important Recovery

So far, we’ve talked strictly about preventing data loss. But as you know, downtime is the real business killer. If your primary office or data center is destroyed, the clock starts ticking. The longer it takes for your company to be fully productive again, the more dollars run down the drain. If you store your disaster recovery cloud backups with the right vendor, you’ll gain access to a variety of recovery options, ranging from file-and-folder recovery to full network virtualization. Should anything go wrong with an endpoint—or even your entire network—you can recover it from anywhere in a matter of seconds.

Final Thoughts

Given the growing threat of disaster, your backups should never be stored in a single location. As noted previously in our blog, consider adopting StorageCraft’s updated 3-2-1 approach to backups. Make sure you have three copies of your data. One should be local so you can quickly recover from small disasters like hardware failure. The second should be offsite, and not connected to your network. And the third should be in the cloud, so you can be sure your data is protected, even in the face of large disasters. Not sure how disaster recovery cloud backups fit in your network? Reach out to one of our sales engineers to talk about what an effective solution for your business might look like.