March 31st is World Backup Day, which makes it the perfect opportunity to share the benefits of implementing a complete backup plan. Unfortunately, the current COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant business interruptions make World Backup Day only too timely this year. Here, we’ll examine how these times make a business continuity strategy and data backup all the more important to have.

What is a Business Disaster?

Technically speaking, a lot of different things could fall under the umbrella term “disaster.” A business disaster could include any event that creates a disruption to that business’ processes, so it isn’t too generous to include the COVID-19 outbreak and (more directly) its impacts in the list. Nevertheless, it would be irresponsible to pretend that the other potential issues that could impact your business become a non-issue just because the focus has shifted to the illness currently dominating the public awareness.

Other than the current pandemic, the term “disaster” covers:

• Natural disasters, like:
  • Fires
  • Floods
  • Storms
  • Earthquakes
  • Tornadoes
  • Blizzards
    
    
• Criminal acts, like
  • Hacking
  • Ransomware
  • Hardware theft
  • Sabotage
• Human error, like:
  • Deleted data
  • Unauthorized shutdowns
  • Unsaved files
  • Lost/damaged devices

Really, anything that causes data loss should be seen as some degree of disaster, so your backup and business continuity strategies become that much more important.

What is Business Continuity?

Business continuity is pretty much what it says on the box: the ability your business has to continue an acceptable level of its operations, despite some kind of obstacle. In the case of coronavirus, your business’ ability to continue its operations, despite your workforce preventatively isolating themselves or being under quarantine from the coronavirus.

While this is the kind of situation that might not obviously require a backup, a backup is always a useful thing to have.

For instance, one implementation that can greatly help your business continuity would be the capability for your team to work remotely. That way, even if they were stuck in their house, they could still serve a useful function to the business. While there are many ways to accomplish this, we always recommend that your business adopts the cloud.

Why? Simple--not only does the cloud allow for convenient and secure access to data from any authorized device, a cloud that is hosted offsite can inherently protect your data from a variety of those other threats listed above. As a result, if any of the above circumstances were to fall upon your business’ location, your business as an entity could continue with a few additional measures in place.

Remember, while there may be a global health crisis going on at the moment, there’s no guarantee that something else won’t impact your business as well.

To learn more about how you can help protect one of your business’ most important assets in disasters of every shape and size, give Argentum IT a call at (502) 473-6407.