Natural Disasters and Data Loss!

On 22nd February 2011 & 13th June 2011, New Zealand was hit by two massive earthquakes that shook up the residents of Christchurch. These tormenting earthquakes took precious lives, demolished homes and greatly affected established businesses. These incidents left critical conditions for the businesses; thereby leaving more than 3000 people jobless and almost 6000 businesses partially or completely destroyed. Many businesses that relied on electronic data suffered total or temporary data loss due to hardware damage and failure. This caused major setbacks for them but also made them realize the importance of data security and back up.

There is a misperception that taking back up means one should have their data stored in another device or external hard drives, though what they don’t realize is that these devices are always vulnerable to damage as seen in the recent earthquakes. Therefore, the best practice to protect and ensure data availability in any crisis situation is to back up data online. Businesses that had already used online backup services were able to restore resume their business processes within no time. Another misperception is that the online backup is more expensive and the same advantages can be achieved by backing up data into portable drives or backup machines. What they fail to realize is that they have this backup with them in nearby vicinity or within the city and when disasters like Christchurch strike, having these backups won’t be of any use.

Offsite storage has its advantages because the servers are located in potentially safer areas. On scheduled time, an automatic data backup can be carried out of all your data which will save you from the hassle of making manual backups which is time consuming and costly (as it involves man power and includes the risk of human errors or backup not been taken on time). These back up servers are located in disaster free areas and they have multiple back up servers which located in different areas than the main servers and they keep a copy of all of the digital data. These secondary back up servers can be used to restore data to the main server in case of any accident or damage and they also come in handy when clients are rerouted to these servers when maintenance of the main server is under process.

Having your data safely organized and stored to online remote servers is a good move and it can save your business and recover all your data if God forbids a disaster strikes! Therefore, make the wise decision before it gets too late!