Time plays a crucial role in the event of data loss caused by a disaster, a data breach or human error. The quicker you get your business up and running following a disaster, the less your bottom line suffers. This period between incident and recovery, called downtime, can cost your business dearly. You could face financial losses, loss of reputation among clients and more. Therefore, timely recovery of crucial data is as important as data backup, if not more.

Despite being aware of today’s nuanced threat landscape, a Unitrends study found that 58% of small businesses are not prepared for a data loss event. Preparing for a data loss event not only entails backing up data but also having a well-tested data recovery strategy in place. While merely having a backup might be sufficient for some forms of business data, such as files, endpoint data and archived data (needed for compliance), data and applications crucial to business functioning require advanced protection. Being unable to recover the latter in time can prove detrimental to business recovery in the aftermath of a disaster.

More importantly, any delay in recovering crucial data could impact the business of one of your clients. For example, data needed to run the online banking service for a financial institution would have to be recovered immediately to prevent any major loss of business. Similarly, applications supporting local government bodies, such as the local police force, would have to be operational at the earliest. In situations like these, it is imperative to have a fail-safe business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan in place that can consistently and effectively handle various contingencies.

While this guide will tell you everything you need to know about building the right data protection strategy for your business, here are the key points.

A Trusted Advisor Can Help

Tackling a disaster is never easy. However, having a trusted advisor in your corner certainly helps, especially one that offers disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS). For example, the white-glove DRaas solution by Unitrends frees you from the hassle of protecting your precious business data from ransomware, natural disasters, infrastructure failures and other prevalent threats. Unitrends DRaaS secures your critical systems and applications on a certified and secure Unitrends cloud, at a cost significantly lower than what you would spend on building and managing an off-site disaster recovery (DR) apparatus.

Unitrends cloud and DR experts take full responsibility of the entire DRaaS process, right from testing and setup to failover and failback, ensuring that you spend minimal time and effort overseeing its installation. Here are five unique benefits that DRaaS provides to ensure your business is covered even in the worst of times:

• Easy to get data in and out: Every Unitrends appliance comes with integrated software built for rapid replication of your business data to Unitrends Cloud. Subsequently, should you ever need to recover any data, multiple data recovery options remain at your disposal at no extra cost.
• Test recovery automatically: With automated testing of data recovery, all possible hindrances to the data recovery process are unearthed and eliminated.
• Recovery reporting: Timely and easy-to-read recovery reports provide you with both actionable insights and the necessary documentation that you can share with compliance auditors and/or the company management.
• Contractual SLAs: Given how meticulously every step of the process is handled, written agreements are offered to you guaranteeing the recovery of your data within contracted timelines, with a recovery SLA as fast as 1 hour available.
• One support call: All it takes to recover your data is one single phone call. Unitrends’ award-winning support, available 24/7/365, acts on your request immediately and assists you throughout the process.

Choose The Right Strategy

Given the list of variables at play, most businesses require a combination of robust solutions to ensure their house is in order with respect to Recovery Point Objective (RPO), Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and investment. In order to fulfill this need, a combination of an easy-to-deploy data backup solution such as Unitrends Cloud Backup, Unitrends backup appliances, and a comprehensive BCDR solution such as Unitrends DRaaS, cover all loose ends in data storage, protection and recovery.