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Business
Continuity or Disaster
More
and more businesses are learning the need for backing up their
data assets. What are the real costs companies face if they
do not backup data and what solutions are available?
This white paper focuses on one of the most serious issues that small
and medium sized businesses (SMB) are facing today: the increase
in data stored electronically and the grave risks these companies
face if they were to lose part or all of their data. The document
intends to help SMB pave the way to protecting their data and
their hard-fought successes.
Businesses depend entirely on the data that
they accumulate. A decade ago, organizations had a problem to
store the tons of printed documents. Business computing, in
fact, was hailed as the solution to this problem as more and
more firms codified all this data (and knowledge) electronically
into their systems. Today, however, businesses are again facing
the problem of storage because of a sheer data explosion. Storage
management is, however, secondary to the more pressing preoccupation
of business continuity in times of data loss.
Data is lost because of a variety of reasons
including hardware failure and human error through accidental
deletion. At times, the data is retrievable and firms only suffer
the cost of downtime, however in instances when the data lost
is irretrievable, profits and revenues are hit hard and many
companies go bankrupt because they never took the necessary
precautions to protect their data. Small and medium sized businesses
are not immune to data loss and the need for data protection
is just as strong as large organizations. Small and medium sized
businesses should look towards estimating the value of their
data. This should help them realize the consequences of data
loss on their business and should lead to the introduction of
an appropriate security architecture that comprehensively protects
their data and knowledge assets.
Central to a strong security architecture is
a powerful backup and recovery management solution. This allows
small and medium sized businesses to regularly reproduce their
continually evolving data assets and to recover these assets
when and if disaster strikes.
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