Business Continuity: The Master Plan every company should have

Today’s Guest Blog is brought to you courtesy of Mark Williams of Pensar IT – one of our partners – an IT support company based in Central London.

Even the best of businesses can suffer disruptions, disasters and emergencies. No matter the reason (natural or human), you have to be prepared for all sort of eventualities, so it makes sense to have a plan to keep your business going.

Pensar have been talking to Hallett Nichol from Datto about this and other factors affecting the world of Business Continuity.

In the last 5 years, the market has seen a transition from a strictly offsite or local backup offering to the more robust hybrid model that includes a local appliance. As more and more businesses move away from the tape backup systems they had in place previously, bandwidth becomes the next concern for IT Solution Providers to deal with. The hybrid model brings security by pushing the initial copy of their information onto a local device through the speed of the network, not through internet bandwidth. This initial local copy brings peace of mind to both the business and to the IT provider of secure storage of their client’s data regardless of their outbound connectivity but it becomes particularly important when bandwidth is an issue.

As the hybrid model gained traction as the most durable and valuable framework for Backup/DR, IT security providers started harnessing their own hybrid model, coupling software with their own custom built appliances. More recently, in the last 3 years, with the creation of INSTANT virtualisation by Datto, Business Continuity has become the next level of Backup/DR. With businesses constantly transitioning more and more physical data into digital data and the high adoption rate of the newest technologies in many small-medium businesses, continuity services are much more of necessity than a luxury.

Regarding the trends likely do disappear; tape is a product that is slowly getting phased out due to the high liability/ high cost/ low recovery time associated with it. There will be a progressive shift over the next few years of companies currently focusing solely on local hard drive backups. The hybrid model solution will become the most sought after and effective form of Backup/DR/Continuity for the SMB space because of its durability in any form of disaster. With the price of bandwidth, especially in the UK, deterring SMBs from upgrading to a faster connection, pushing their most critical data to a local appliance at the speed of their network before pushing it into the cloud becomes crucial.

As businesses digitise more and more of their information, their internal infrastructures will need to expand rapidly thus making their entire business more vulnerable to any sort of IT failure. Without a proper DRP in place, businesses run the risk of letting the smallest of outages cripple their business.

Now that you know more about Business Continuity and its importance to a business, take a couple of minutes to think if you have a proper plan in place in case disaster strikes. Hmmm…is that a no? Well, Pensar have a Disaster Recovery Planning tool. Get in touch with Pensar for your copy.