SMBs in general don’t have the same IT budgets & staffs as larger enterprises. Yet just like larger organizations they need to protect their data & make sure they can get back to business rapidly after a disaster or other event that compromises their data and systems.
Downtime is real, and it’s costly.
Across all businesses, it’s a staggering $163,674 per hour, according to research by the Aberdeen Group. Of course, the exact cost depends on company size: small companies lose approximately $8,581 per hour; medium companies $215,638 per hour; and large enterprises a whopping $686,250 for every hour of downtime.
What causes downtime? As it turns out, businesses should be more wary of their own employees than of natural disasters. Although hurricanes, tornadoes, and the like do their fair share of damage, research shows that natural disasters account for just 10 percent of downtime. The leading culprits? Network outages (50 percent) and human error (45 percent).
So, if you’ve been putting protecting your data off because you consider yourself in a safe zone, you need to understand that it’s far more likely that a server will malfunction, or that someone will hit the delete key on an important document than anything Mother Nature could throw at you. No business anywhere can afford to be complacent.
Making sure your business can continue operating in case of any type of disaster is just as essential to SMBs as it is to the largest enterprises. For that reason, business continuity using data backup is an essential solution that SMBs should deploy.
Data backup solutions come in all different flavors. Cloud-based solutions are increasingly popular, but they provide only a partial answer. On-site solutions also have their weaknesses.
The answer is a hybrid cloud. It provides the best of all worlds: you can recover data swiftly from a local device for the most common causes of data loss, but you have all your data safely stored in the cloud for more extreme events in which the local device is destroyed or unavailable.