Posts
Protecting your company’s data should be of high importance, no matter where your office is located or how many employees you have. Downtime is real and if and when it does occur, the cost PER HOUR can range between $9,000 to $700,000, according to the Aberdeen Group (2013). On top of this, most crises happen because of human error and network outages, rather than natural disasters, as everyone mistakenly believes. Read more
We know that Business Continuity solutions are relatively new for many business people. Traditional methods to data backup and restore have been tapes and drives. These are now being replaced with software solutions that can perform on-site backups through virtualization as well as off-site backups to the ‘cloud’, without any manual intervention. On top of this, restoration can take hours rather than days.
Here’s a look at a few key terms used when speaking about Business Continuity Read more
In many of our previous articles written about Business Continuity solutions, we mention the word “virtualization”. To give a brief explanation of where this key word comes in, it’s important to describe the process of a Business Continuity solution in action. Let’s take a look at the QBR solution’s backup process Read more
Have you encountered a major disaster at your company? Or do you know anyone that has?
Many of us believe that our business is different and that it won’t encounter a disaster. This mentality can cause a lot more problems if one day a disaster does strike. It is crucial to be well prepared, just in case of emergency, instead of trying to plan AFTER a disaster strikes, which will be too late.
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
