Iomart : What data and Christmas presents have in common

Think of your valuable business data like the Christmas presents you painstakingly picked out for your friends and family. You spent your hard-earned money, scrolled with bleary eyes through online store after online store. You maybe even battled through your local shopping centre, laden with bags, sweat dripping from furrowed brow as you search for the last pink digger truck on earth.

Now you're home. You've wrapped them. They're safely under the tree. Each present is tailored to each recipient. If you lose them, they're irreplaceable.

An unexpected Christmas disaster strikes

Some devious grinch makes their way into your home and takes everything (even the stockings). It's a disaster. Snow globes smashed, presents gone, tree overturned. You've no idea what to do or where to start.

An unexpected business disaster strikes

Now replicate that feeling. And imagine it's the business you've poured countless hours into. With staff and customers relying on you, any downtime can cause big problems.

It's unfortunate, but disaster can strike at any time. Your servers could be flooded, or you could fall victim to a ransomware attack. So having some sort of backup and disaster recovery solution in place is vital.

There are 3 key solutions when it comes to keeping your business safe:

1. Recovery plan (you consult with experts to create a personalised recovery plan - so you know exactly what steps to take should disaster strike).
2. Data protection (your data is protected with a robust backup service - so you can get back the mission-critical data you need to keep your business running)
3. Disaster Recovery (so while your back up and running, you can quickly recover anything you've lost to the disaster)

A disaster recovery plan is a good place to start

A disaster recovery strategy is there to make sure your business can keep going if an unexpected disruptive event happens - whether that's a cyber-attack or a full-blown natural disaster. But good disaster recovery planning and good crisis management can make a big difference to how quickly you can regain key business functions.

With a disaster recovery plan, you're all prepared. There's no flapping when something goes wrong. It's simply a set of actions you methodically take to minimise any damage to your business quickly and effectively.

Having robust data protection in place is key

You've got your disaster recovery plan in place, so no one's in a panic if something goes wrong (great place to start). Now its's time to have a look at how well your data is protected with a robust and flexible backup solution. This allows you to access your data whenever you need it, while knowing it's backed up regularly and securely.

The data protection solution you choose should be designed to suit your business needs. You should be able to decide on things like:

• How often you'd like your data backed up
• How long you'd like your provider to retain your data
• If you want full or incremental backup
• What you'd like from your log capture schedule
• If you'd like retry options on any failure
• If you'd like custom blackout widows
• What you'd like your archive policy to be
• What you'd like your replication policy to be.

A good provider should be able to protect an array of sources for you, like:

• Virtual machines (VMWare, Hyper-V, Oracle, AWS, Azure)
• Network Attached Storage
• Databases (MSSQL, MySQL, Oracle, MongoDB etc)
• Microsoft 365
• Physical servers.

Good data protection offers you peace of mind - if something goes wrong you have everything you need backed up. You can retrieve your mission-critical data, so your business is back up and running as quickly as possible.

Disaster recovery to return all the data you lost

You have your disaster recovery plan in place, along with a flexible and robust data protection solution. Now it's time to think about disaster recovery.

Your backup solution will get all of your day-to-day data back to you, so you can keep your users and customers ticking over. But what if something goes wrong? And the data you've backed up has been compromised too? This is when disaster recovery comes into play.

With disaster recovery, we'll hold a replica of your critical backed up data. So if your data centre has a fire, or you fall victim to a ransomware attack, you're covered.

With this added protection, the disaster that befell you will soon be a distant memory.

We can't save your Christmas, but we can save your data

Turns out Santa had Christmas covered. All of those valuable presents that were lost, damaged or stolen - there were replicas backed up at the grotto. On Christmas day, the pink truck is there, and the smashed snow globe has been replaced with a level of efficiency that can only be magic. It's as if nothing happened. The tree is back upright, the lights glowing calmly in the corner. Christmas is saved.

We can offer you that same level of calm. Now we're not comparing ourselves to Santa (his magic is unrivalled) But we can offer you the same peace of mind with our Full Recovery solution area. Which bundles together:

1. Your own personalised Recovery Plan
2. Robust and flexible Data Protection
3. 10 free days of Disaster Recovery (yes completely free).

If you'd like to know more, get in touch.