Immediate Protection

The first step of any business should be to keep critical computers and servers on UPS, or Uninterrupted Power Supply, systems. These come in both small and large footprints to give a single computer a few minutes of backup to keeping servers up and running for hours. In the event of a power outage, UPS systems will keep your in-process data from being lost. However, these systems still won’t prevent data-loss if there is physical disruption to your building(s).

Data Loss Prevention

Many companies make the mistake of keeping their data back-ups on-site. While certainly the most inexpensive option, storing back up data on-site, even on different drives or servers, is a significant risk. Effective if the primary system fails for any reason, this is not so effective if your office is suddenly under 3 feet of water. If you can, be sure to secure data off-site. 

If your company is large enough to have two separate sites, you can manually create an off-site back up system. However, this type of solution is best implemented if your multiple sites are geographically separated; it does no good to have your data sent across the street to avoid the effects of a hurricane.

Choose an alternate site that can house everything that’s on the primary server and manually store backups of your data at this secondary site. With a few macros set up by your IT team or an outside consultant, data can be transferred from your primary to backup server at a regular interval (usually in the middle of the night) when the impact of sending all of the data from site to site won’t even be noticed.

If your company is housed in a single location or you want a sure-fire way to keep a backup safe, then look to cloud servers. Storing a backup of your critical data in the cloud may be an ideal solution for a small business or any business interested in preventing data loss. Neither rain nor sleet or snow or wind catastrophes will halt operations with a cloud-based backup system. Data management companies exist to provide services to store data and keep your files so that you always have secure backups.

Act Now

Data management is critical to any company. No one plans for an accident to happen or predicts disaster. The best solution is to act now so that you’re ready just in case. Your choice to mitigate the risk of data loss due to natural disaster can vary based on your budget, impact of lost data, and appetite for assuming that risk. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution, but there are multiple options out there for any business.