Many business owners who are unfamiliar with IT tend to believe that backup and disaster recovery plans and data redundancy are one and the same thing. This is not at all the case, even though both disaster recovery and data redundancy play critical roles in your company’s success. Understanding the differences between the two will help you make better business continuity decisions in the long run.
Redundancy vs. Recovery
Backup and disaster recovery plans, also known as BDR plans, are crucial for the success of your business. These plans line out how your company will react in the event that you experience a loss of data due to hardware failure, natural disaster, cyberattack, or any other event. If you look at a BDR plan like a wagon wheel, then data redundancy is one of the spokes that keeps it all together. To put this in perspective, if you have an offsite data backup, that is considered a recovery plan, and the redundancy comes into play when you reinforce that backup by keeping more than one copy for extra protection.
Why Offsite Redundancy is Critical
Imagine for a second what would happen if your company experienced data loss. You will not only lose your customers’ (and your company’s) data, but you will also lose time and money attempting to recover that data to keep your business functional. In many cases where businesses experience an unexpected data loss, they find themselves unable to carry on operations for several days, and in some cases, especially for newer, smaller businesses, this can result in serious issues that may even lead to failure. Having a backup offsite is a critical part of any Disaster Recovery Plan. Offsite backups help protect against natural disasters, such as earthquakes, fires, and floods. They also help protect against security breaches, cyber attacks, or recovering from ransomware.
Redundancy and Customer Satisfaction
The most important part of being successful in any business venture involves keeping your customers satisfied with the products and services you offer them. If you cannot deliver on your promises because of data loss, then your customer service capabilities simply do not exist. For a small business, or one that is just getting off the ground, this could be a serious hit to their reputation and one that they may not be able to recover from. If you must admit to your customers that their information has been compromised in some way, they will lose the most important thing in any customer/client-business relationship – trust. Once it’s gone, it’s difficult to get back.
How to Put Together a Data Redundancy Plan
While you can certainly create your own redundant data backups, managing and monitoring these backups takes a great deal of time and resources that many business owners just don’t have. The best and most popular way to protect data is to hire an outside company to provide your managed backup and disaster recovery plan, which includes redundancy for your company’s safety and success. Professionals will monitor your data around the clock, and should something go wrong, they will immediately resolve it, thereby saving you countless dollars and perhaps even saving your business’s reputation along the way.
No matter how small your business might be, and even if you’re just getting started, if you rely on data for your success, then redundancy should be at the top of your priority list alongside backup and disaster recovery. By keeping multiple copies of your data backups in more than one place, you can easily recover that data in the event of an emergency without downtime, without loss of trust, and without spending a small fortune.
