Your Business versus Mother Nature

Business Consultants earn hundreds of thousands ofNature's wrath and you have a recipe for some
dollars every year showing businesses how toserious data loss in the unfortunate event that one
improve their productivity. All business consultants inof these uncommon, but critically devastating, events
the Information Technology area agree that theoccur. In most cases your existing backup solution
biggest threat to business survival is data loss.would be useless and would suffer the same peril as
There are many different data backup solutionsyour original data.
available on the Internet today. Unlike years pastThe answer is simple: Have a complete, up-to-date
there are not only different providers but also manycopy of your data stored at a different location. You
different methods of data backup. Some solutionsshould back up your data using an offsite data
are "on-site" based methods. These include tapebackup service. Offsite data backups allow you to
drives or other magnetic storage media, DVD-R andstore mission critical digital files in a secure, remote
CD-R based methods and NAS (network attachedlocation. When you store data in an offsite location
storage) methods of creating local (within the LAN)you are doubling the protection of your most import
backups of critical data. These methods of datadata files and enabling a level of security that even
backup are definitely better than nothing, and canthe best on-premises data backup solutions can't
provide protection against user error, data corruption,provide.
and in some cases even computer theft (that is ifYour data is encrypted and backed up over your
the data backup equipment itself isn't also stolen) andexisting internet connection to a secure server. You
many of the other pitfalls associated with digitalcan set it up to perform backups at any frequency
media.you wish. You can even set up the system to
But what about protection against the most powerfulschedule backups while the office is empty on
of all forces, Mother Nature?weekends and evenings, or when the computers are
Hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, and other naturalidle for a certain period of time (great for those
disasters are a serious potential threat to the crucialsystems that need to be accessed 24/7 and cannot
data you have stored within your computer network.afford the potential downtime that may be incurred
Add into the equation the collateral damage ofdue to backup procedures being run at the time).
flooding and fire that often comes along with Mother