4 Scary Disaster Scenarios That Show Why You Need Offsite Backups

Offsite backups can protect your critical business data no matter what happens at your business location.

Risk experts from across the globe named business interruption as the No. 1 risk for a fifth consecutive year, according to statistics published in the Allianz Risk Barometer for 2017. Respondents named the following scenarios as most concerning:

• Fire or explosion – 44%
• Natural catastrophe – 43%
• Cyber incident – 29%
• Equipment failure – 29%

Statistics on downtime in the U.S. support experts’ concerns about the risks. A recent survey compiled by researchers at IHS Markit found that the combined expense of communication and information technology downtime costs North American companies $700 billion annually.

Offsite Backup Can Reduce Downtime (and the Financial Losses That Come With It)

All these concerns can be mitigated with the implementation of offsite backup and recovery options. In the next few paragraphs, we’ll explain how offsite backups can help you minimize your risk for downtime and data loss if your business is interrupted by any of the events listed above.

Scenario 1: Fire or Explosion

Regarding plausible concerns, some risk experts cited ramifications of political tensions and terrorism, including fires and explosions. Malicious activities aside, fires and explosions are common enough in the aftermath of a mutiny that they warrant consideration.

Depending on the severity of a fire or explosion, your business location maybe completely unavailable. If the fire is widespread in an area, nearby backup locations may also be off limits. This is another compelling reason to have geographically separate backup locations. If your systems and data are stored in a remote location, you can restore services in a matter of minutes. While your physical location may be completely devastated, your business can keep operating and generating revenue. Your customers won’t experience delays or interruptions and may not even realize what has happened to your physical location.

Scenario 2: Natural Catastrophe

The type of natural disaster that could disrupt your business might depend on your location. Businesses near coastlines are at risk for floods and hurricanes, for example, while companies in the midwestern U.S. are at risk for tornadoes. No matter what type of natural catastrophe occurs, it is almost certain your location and nearby backup locations will be unavailable for hours, maybe days.

However, if you have redundant systems in one or more offsite locations, it will be fast and easy to restore your network and applications. Your customers will experience minimal disruption regardless of what has happened to your business location.

Cyber Incidents

Hackers who use ransomware are using more aggressive tactics than the traditional email phishing scheme. In the past, companies could foil a ransomware attack with a strong backup solution. With backup information on hand, the ransom demand is meaningless, right? Not anymore.

Hackers are now using brute-force attacks on routers to bypass employees. They no longer solely target primary data; any local backup data is up for grabs. However, if your data is stored in one or more secure backup locations, you could restore your data even if a hacker stole your local backup.

Hardware Failure

A common cause of data loss is related to hardware and software failures and glitches. For example, errors in RAID arrays often compromise or corrupt data. When hardware or software fails, the errors could be copied to a local backup.

Many backup services include several historical restoration points, so you can restore your data from the last known point when your systems were functioning properly.

Offsite Backup and Recovery Options

There are many offsite backup and recovery options available from a simple cloud storage system to complete backup infrastructure on standby. Most companies depend on technology for their operations and cannot tolerate even a small amount of downtime.

No matter what happens to your local infrastructure, our ezRecovery and ezVault backup services, combined with our managed standby, compute, storage, and infrastructure, will give you the ability to restore protected applications, data, and user access quickly and easily.

Contact an ABC Services backup and recovery expert to find out how we can restore your entire IT infrastructure in a matter of minutes.

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