Since just about everything in business has moved into the digital realm, organization and protection of company data is absolutely critical. This means data about your customers, inventory, receivables, important files and the like. Similarly important is backing up this data, ensuring that copies of everything a company needs to remain in business will be available. This is where a managed services provider can be invaluable; the right managed services vendor is vital to a business and can deliver on many important technology fronts, none more important than protecting company data. Their system will become your company’s way of organizing, copying, and protecting all information. Having this backup safety net for everything your company could ever need is important, for the reasons listed below.
Storage Offsite
Imagine taking every piece of information within your company and information that has been exchanged between your employees and customers and placing an exact digital copy of it somewhere else. That is exactly what a good managed services provider does when backing up your data. If your facility is impacted in a fire or flood, or there is a burglary and a few important computers are stolen, you have nothing to worry about. All data will be preserved by your managed service provider and your insurance should cover lost, damaged or stolen assets. Make no mistake the most irreplaceable asset a small business has is their company data. Loss of this asset is the number one reason small businesses fail after a disaster. Hardware is easy to replace, the historical record of your company is not.
Much More Secure
We read daily about “hackers” breaking into computer systems and stealing data. This is not just a problem for large business; small businesses are impacted as well. While your company could possibly be hacked, a good managed service provider is built like a bank for data, protecting it from physical dangers and virtual ones as well. Not only will a managed service provider make it harder to break into your computers, but they can help store your data in an encrypted manner, meaning that even if it is stolen, it will not be usable. As hackers become more and more adept at accessing people’s information and stealing data, you will need a service that is just as adept at stopping them.
Are Your Employees Asked to Back Things Up
If you feel like you are backing up your data today pause and think about who in your company is performing this role, what are their qualifications and how often is their work checked. Are your employees testing these backups to ensure your business is really able to recover? Backing up data is a rather tedious and cumbersome IT task, one that is fraught with errors and frankly best left to IT professionals. Your companies employees are certainly great people and have a lot of tasks assigned that require the specific skills for which they were hired. If you did not hire them for the data backup task then don’t be too surprised with less than desirable results. With the right managed services provider concerns over data backup can be a thing of the past.
Most managed service providers have what are known as backup schedulers or incremental backups which allows them to occur automatically every hour, day, week, month, year—it’s entirely up to what you believe to be the necessary. The more often you back up, the less chance exists for information to be lost. Conveniently, only new items will be saved every time the system backs up, saving time and money for everyone.
Business Restoration is Easy
So let’s say the worst possible thing happens—fire, flood, break-in—and data critical to your company is lost. With prior planning and the support of a managed service provider in place, the restoration of all lost data is easier and can be done in a very short period of time—and usually, the vendor will handle it, meaning you can concentrate on getting the physical and operational aspects of your business back in order, while they worry about the digital ones.
Bring IT All Together for Peace of Mind
You have a business to run, but it’s impossible to run a business without data. Take steps to ensure an experienced and knowledgeable professional performs a periodic backup of you company’s data. Pick a managed services firm that has the demonstrated ability to plan your backups, execute them and most important perform periodic recovery tests. These actions will bring greater peace of mind and allow you to focus on your business and not your technology.
Related Resources
