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Activ Link saves the data in Kingston upon Thames

Hard drives have a 100% failure rate — they all fail eventually. Moreover, they´re not terribly great at giving you a heads up on their individual health, so one day its working fine and the next its more useful as a glorified doorstop.

So what?

There´s nothing essentially wrong with a hard drive failure — it is just a mechanical object, after all — but the problem is that its usually holding essential business data: client records, invoices, accounts, creative solutions, sales and marketing plans, unique breakthroughs that you developed, and so on.

If a company´s hard drive fails without sufficient backup and recovery protocols in place the average business is looking at £500—£1,000 of immediate costs to attempt to recover the data (sometimes impossible) — and that doesn´t include the costs of lost business whilst waiting for the retrieved data or what happens if it’s not recoverable.

Business IT Support Kingston upon Thames Activ Link are familiar with such scenarios and regularly setup powerful backup solutions for their clients. “The key is not to rely on either human beings or the invincibility of hardware. Build in redundancy and automation at every possible point,” says Yvan Bamping, Director at Activ Link.

According to a BioMagazine article in December 2007, studies show that 80% of companies without a well—conceived data protection and recovery strategy go out of business within 2 years of a major disaster.

The most common causes of data loss (a major disaster) are, typically: hardware malfunction (44%); human error (32%); software corruption (14%); computer viruses (7%); and natural disasters (3%).

But isn´t an effective solution too expensive?

Fortunately, just like the costs of standardised IT hardware — such as hard drives, RAM, desktops, laptops, etc — the costs of an effective backup and recovery solution have come down in virtual freefall. If you’re confident in your own IT skills, then you could probably do some research and get the solution up and running within a few hours. Of course, testing it and being confident to rely on it in a crisis might be another matter.

When considering whether or not to call out an IT company like Activ Link to recommend, implement, test and maintain a backup solution for you, you might just weigh up the costs of NOT having an effective solution in place when things go wrong.

What is it worth to you to have your business still operating (let alone profitably) a few quarters after a major data loss incident?

A couple of additional important questions that Activ Link recommend asking when considering a secure remote data backup service include:

Are there any single points of failure or is everything redundant in the recommended solution?

Is my data secure from theft both in transit (to remote backup locations) and in storage?

Is there going to be someone available to assist me if something does go wrong or do I have to manage it all myself?

If I suddenly increase the amount of data needing backup, will my account overflow and upgrade or will it just stop backing up the excess?

Whilst additional support and redundancy might cost you that little bit extra, it could make all the difference between a healthy business surviving a major data loss incident or dying a slow and expensive death.

“There are very expensive solutions that the bigger boys work with, but we’re taking care of small businesses with a tighter cashflow but no less of a reliance on their data being securely backed up. You don’t have to break the bank, but it might if you don’t speak to us about your options,” encourages ActivLink