Alan wrote an article about disaster recover which was published in Solutions Review in which he highlighted how so many companies are on the brink of disaster without even knowing it and how fixing IT’s biggest problem is an easy thing to fix.
He talked about backup and disaster recovery. He has been in the business more than twenty plus years and is still shocked at what his team find, often causing him sleepless nights as his clients sleep blissfully unaware of the precipice towards which they are teetering. While virtually every business has a backup and disaster recovery system in place, many fail to monitor it in the way they should. They trust that it is working, and if it doesn’t, they assume they will be alerted in some fashion when something goes wrong. Hopefully they dig deeper before there is a real problem by which time it is often too late.
He described how many firms who do have a good backup system in place frequently merely fail to check the status daily and he points out that by far the biggest weakness in any disaster recovery system, is the people monitoring it. It could be that an error occurred months ago and that no backups have run since yet, it often takes less than 1 minute to check a backup, though many users assume it’s working or that it will notify them of an issue, but if a system fails badly enough, it may be unable to send an error code or alert.
To stress just how vital having good and effective disaster recovery is absolutely essential, he sites some alarming figures. 93 percent of companies which lost data for more than 10 days filed for bankruptcy within one year. 50 percent of businesses filed for bankruptcy immediately. Does this happen much? We frequently get “that” call where a business dials us in a panic after having a disaster, and after days of stress they aren’t making progress. People have given up or walked away and now it’s gone critical. Every week 140,000 hard drives crash in the United States. According to one study, the worst catastrophe most businesses experience is not fire, flood or earthquake, but malware – and that, regrettably, is rapidly getting worse, not better.
He raises the issues of where the backups are stored and goes on to discuss backing up to the cloud and then discusses the need to actually test the entire system annually and asks the question ‘could your business survive if you irretrievably lost all your data, if it could be recreated and stresses that there is nothing more vital to any firm than just such a situation. He tells businesses to do themselves a favor, to ask the questions, to checks things out and to question the status quo.
