By Understanding ‘Good/Better/Best’ Options, Small and Midsize Businesses Can Avoid Disaster

ITEXPO West 2014

LOS ANGELES, CA – August 6, 2014 — /BackupReview.info/ — Hurricane season is fully upon us, with forecasters predicting that as many as nine tropical storms will form in the Atlantic between now and the end of November.

Fortunately, savvy businesses won’t need to board up any windows, figuratively speaking, if their applications and data already live in the cloud. So says Adam Stern, founder and CEO of cloud-hosting provider Infinitely Virtual. Noting that researchers think four tropical storms will strengthen into hurricanes with winds of at least 74 mph – and that one of those hurricanes will intensify into a major hurricane with peak winds exceeding 110 mph – Stern suggests that vigilance is simply good business.

“Small business owners rightly fret about data loss,” he says. “You needn’t be a mega-enterprise awash in big data to recognize the potential peril to business health from even a ‘minor’ erosion in data security, and natural disasters are among the most disruptive events a small business can face. And that’s exactly why businesses need to wean themselves from traditional backup and recovery solutions.”

According to Stern, backup procedures live on a continuum:

  • #1 – Good: Local backup taken offsite. Backup tested monthly by performing restores. Logs reviewed by engineers. While data is taken offsite, the process is both time consuming and expensive. Does not prevent productivity loss.
  • #2 – Better: Online backup. Gets customer data offsite. Prevents data loss due to any number of catastrophic occurrences. Does not prevent productivity loss that ensues when applications vanish.
  • #3 – Best: Placing applications and data in the cloud with a provider who does application-consistent snapshots and replicates data to data centers outside the customer’s geography.

Opting for the third alternative, Stern advises small and midsize businesses (SMBs) to get their data out of the office entirely – out of the office, and into the cloud. Paradoxically, moving it out is the very best way to obtain 100 percent control over data. “It’s a matter of cutting the apron strings and delivering a little tough love to that data,” he says. “It’ll be safer and more secure for the effort.”

According to Stern, the real issue isn’t how to protect an SMB from data loss, but how to protect a business from productivity loss – which is why Option #3 is clearly the way to go. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) was created expressly to enable businesses to run everything natively in the cloud, with 100 percent confidence. Cloud-based backup means, among other things, zero data loss, zero security breaches, zero lost sleep.

Contact
Edge Communications, Inc.
Ken Greenberg
323-469-3397
ken@edgecommunicationsinc.com

Source: Infinitely Virtual

 

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