The most likely answer is too much.
Modern businesses lose money, time and even clients as a result of a disaster or security breach. Traditionally, companies would use a secondary data centre to protect against data loss. However, the building and maintenance of these can be expensive due to initial capital investment, utilities and hardware refreshes.
What does the word ‘disaster’ mean to you? Normally, it brings to mind disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes; events that are not commonplace in the UK. While events of this nature can impact a company’s IT, it is worth noting that 55% of disaster-related downtime stems from hardware failure, 22% from human error, and 18% from software failure (Quorum, 2013). As disasters are largely due to technical issues rather than natural occurrences (5%), it is becoming increasingly important for companies to invest in disaster recovery and backup recovery solutions.
Could you fully recover your data?
With this in mind, could you fully recover your data? It can be difficult to make time to regularly backup your files, and this could result in data loss in the event of a disaster. Cloud backup solutions can solve this problem by automatically transmitting changes in files and databases, resulting in continuous backup.
Where is this backup data stored?
The next question is: where is this backup data stored? If it’s located on-site, then it might be at risk should a flood or fire occur. You could stand to lose not only your primary data but your backup data too. The solution to this is to store the backup data at a highly secure offsite location, where your data is guaranteed to stay safe.
Your Solution
Microsoft can minimise the risk and cost of downtime with storage that both protects and organises your data so that you can recover it quickly and easily. The word disaster doesn’t have to sound quite so expensive – Microsoft Azure Backup and Site Recovery offer low-cost solutions that address each step in the data protection workflow.
There are many benefits to Microsoft Azure Backup and Site Recovery:
- Fully recovering data is simplified with rapid recovery and plans at the level of detail you require.
- Immediate and automatic backup to an off-site location protects your data.
- Secure storage that is tailored to your company’s retention policies and scheduling.
- Azure allows you to take advantage of an incremental, pay-as-you-use plan with no capital investment required.
- Site Recovery monitors the state of your protected instances continuously and remotely.