When we map out a network for a business, a
huge factor that goes into the decision-making process is about the data that
travels across the network. Your organization’s data, and it’s security and
continuity, is extremely important. In fact, we feel it’s one of the most
important aspects of your business.
Your Data is More Than Just Your
Documents
It’s not uncommon for someone to think about
their company’s data as just their documents. Depending on your industry, that
might consist of your sales and marketing brochures, invoice/quote templates,
presentations, meeting notes, scanned signed documents, and more. After all, at
home, for most users, your data mostly consists of music, videos, photos, and
other documents. Most home users can just store all of those files on a
separate hard drive or on a cloud service and be in pretty good shape as far as
data redundancy goes.
For businesses, it gets more complicated
pretty quickly. Do you use a line of business app to track inventory or
production? Do you have a CRM tool to track customer engagement and sales
opportunities? Does your industry have compliance standards where you need to
retain records of certain information for a certain amount of time?
All of your software applications that your
employees use tend to store data in their own way; some might use a database on
your server, others might let you export the data into a kind of spreadsheet
called a CSV, and some might have even less conventional means.
Let’s use Quickbooks as an example. All
throughout the week, your staff is managing the information in Quickbooks to
manage and pay bills, handle payroll, etc. If you were to log into Quickbooks
one day and find all of that data missing, you could be in some serious
trouble, and in a best-case scenario, have to spend hours and hours
re-populating it.
If Quickbooks is only storing the data in one
place, and it isn’t getting backed up, you are out of luck.
You have data within these applications that needs to be backed up and stored
redundantly, and done so automatically so it happens without fail every single
day.
Sometimes, we’ve even seen cases where these
types of applications just get installed on a single workstation and have all
of their data only stored on that one computer or laptop as opposed to
centralized on a company server. A year or two later, if that user gets an
upgrade or leaves the company and their local data is purged, it’s only then
discovered that the software wasn’t set up correctly in the first place.
It’s critical to understand where all of these
pieces are being stored, and ensuring that they are being backed up.
How confident are you in your business continuity? Unless you are 110 percent certain that every single piece of company information is being stored redundantly both at your location and in an offsite location, your data backup situation needs to be evaluated. Even if you are 110 percent confident in your backup, it’s worth having a separate set of eyes look upon it. Reach out to Emerge today and let’s talk about your business continuity.