We have a great infographic to help our readers learn more about the differences between a traditional ‘backup and restore’ system and a Business Continuity solution. Read more
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I often find myself writing or speaking about Business Continuity as many do not know or fully understand the concept. When I bring up this topic, many business executives assume it is simply another “backup” solution, in which they then tell me they already have one. However, our QBR Business Continuity Solution is not just a backup, but instead a complete solution helping businesses recover quickly in times of disaster. This is extremely important to know and realize one cannot compare a data backup solution and a Business Continuity solution. In a previous article, I mentioned the differences between data backup and business continuity, however today I will explain the differences between all 3 commonly used IT security terms; Data Backup, BDR and Business Continuity.
Business executives normally don’t think twice about their backup system – it is something that has been part of the regularroutine of many businesses for quite some time now. Traditional backup software is typically a software program that works along with a media, like a backup tape or an external hard drive. However, nowadays, backup solutions have been upgraded as many IT providers have witnessed businesses go through disasters where they either lost all their data due to tape malfunction or had a slow recovery process where downtime costs were extremely high. Therefore, something needed to be done to ensure these dangers were eliminated.
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This week, from June 15 to 18, the World Disaster Management Conference was held in Toronto at the Metro Toronto Convention Center. Unfortunately, ever since 2009, there has been a drastic decline in attendance partly due to training and conference budget cuts. According to a great article in Ottawa’s Metro News (2014), prior to this conference, organizers conducted a survey to see if this budget cut had any effect on the conference participants and community. What they found however went beyond what they imagined.
Disasters, either natural, man-made or technological, happen whether we want them to or not. We all have lived through at least one disaster situation in the past 10 years, either in our workplace or at home. Who doesn’t remember the terrible Hurricanes that attacked parts of the U.S., like Sandy, Rita, Katrina or Ivan, and the devastating Lac-Mégantic train derailment in 2013 right here in Québec. One of Montreal’s most famous and expensive disasters was the 1998 Ice Storm, where many homes and businesses didn’t have power for many days/weeks. Read more
Data backup, recovery, disaster; three of the most sensitive topics for business owners and executives. Questions that are being raised more and more, due to the accessibility and affordability of technology in small to mid-size enterprises, include ‘How much time does it take for my business to go back to normal in case of data loss caused by a natural disaster or hardware malfunction?’ and ‘what is the committed response time of IT professionals in case of a disaster at my company?’ The goal of course of every executive is to reduce business losses (revenues, data, time) by having the quickest recovery possible. Read more
My team and I often receive the following questions by IT staff and business executives of small to mid-size businesses:
- “What are the dangers that we aren’t aware of by using the backup and restore solution we currently have in place at our company, i.e. tape drive, storage device, etc?”
- “How can a business continuity solution handle our backup needs better than my current backup solution?”
- “What are the differences between these two solutions; backup and restore versus business continuity?”
In this article, I will highlight the main differences between a traditional data backup and restore solution and a business continuity solution.
I will emphasize the major differences based on the most commonly used backup solutions in the SME market versus QBR, the “hybrid” business continuity solution, which we have been implementing in the small and mid-size market, as a disaster recovery solution.
Let’s begin with a few key definitions and terms. Read more
In this article, following my previous blog “Data Restore and Disaster Recovery: Is your business protected?”, I will go a step further and explain why it’s important for business owners and enterprise executives to have a business continuity solution at their company and how to find the right one for their business. Read more
In this article, I will share what I have learnt over the years about data backup and security, restore and disaster recovery. Hopefully, I will be able to answer a few of your questions that I have heard many times before from small and medium-sized business executives. I will also address how all 3 of these processes are different from a true business continuity solution.
I will begin by focusing on each of these topics separately and then move on to discuss their limitations. Read more
