Direct Technology Group Blog

Without technology, your business cannot run the way it needs to. If a disaster strikes, there is no telling how much it could affect operations. For example, a hurricane or a cyberattack could disrupt operations to the point where your business cannot function the way it needs to. Today, we want to highlight some of the ways that a disaster recovery system can help you overcome these hurdles.

You’ve likely seen many blogs on our feed about data backup and disaster recovery, and that is because it’s an incredibly important solution for businesses of all kinds. Today, we want to look at the 3-2-1 rule and how it can help your business preserve its important assets in the event of a disaster.

What’s the difference between a power strip and a surge protector? It turns out, quite a lot, and the difference is much more than just the number of plugs on it. Let’s discuss some of the biggest ways that these two important pieces of power supply technology differ and how you should determine which one best suits your needs.

The presence of a continuity strategy holds immense significance. When discussing continuity plans, one often encounters the term "failover." Let's take a look into the concept of failover and explore various facets associated with it.

If you’ve spent any time at all reading our blog—or even looking at the topics we cover, for that matter—you’ve seen how often we talk about the importance of your business’s cybersecurity. The fact that we have to is frankly a little depressing. Trust me, I’d love to be able to spend all my time bringing your technology to the next level, instead of keeping ne'er-do-wells from undermining it. However, the reality is that every organization needs to focus on its cybersecurity, and this is becoming more and more the case all the time.

Look, we know that thinking about disasters can be a nerve-wracking experience, but you need to acknowledge that your organization is constantly in danger of becoming subverted by challenges outside your control. While you might not be able to stop a disaster from striking, you can be prepared for when it does strike, as well as how you respond to it. Let’s go over some of the methods you can use to ensure you have a plan in place.

When a disaster strikes your business and your important data is compromised, can your business recover? Can it recover quick enough for it to not be irreparably damaged? Could you even conduct business without the lost data? How much downtime can your business even take? 

Data backup is a critical part of any successful business, and, because it’s so simple, it may actually be overlooked. This week, we’ll walk you through the proper steps for making sure your organization has a successful data backup solution so if a situation arises and you need it, you’ll have it ready to recover and not be exasperated to find out that your business is in deep trouble. 

When you get right down to it, your business is probably vulnerable to cyberattacks, no matter how prepared you are. There are countless ways you can improve your operations, but if you don’t take steps now to safeguard your company’s infrastructure, you could risk facing an even greater threat to your business’ future: a cybersecurity breach. There are simple steps that can be taken to help ensure your organization isn’t sunk by a random security breach.

No matter where your business calls home, it will be vulnerable to some sort of disaster, whether it’s a natural disaster that wipes your office off the map or a cyberattack that cripples your data infrastructure. You don’t have to resign yourself to this fate, though; with the appropriate tools, your business can survive just about anything and keep operations going even under the worst circumstances.

Even when everything is going well, running a business can be challenging—all of that is to say that things are especially difficult when everything starts to go wrong, particularly in the realm of business continuity. While nobody likes to imagine the worst-case scenario, we always like to say that imaging the worst-case scenario can help you prepare for it, and it can take the sting away from dealing with it.

Unless you live under a rock and somehow missed it, Facebook experienced an outage, an inconvenience that kept users from accessing its services all over the world. Perhaps to your surprise, the real ramifications of this outage have nothing to do with people not being able to share pictures of their cats or yell at each other in the comments.

When we discuss business continuity, the generalization “disaster” could mean just about anything that halts normal business operations. How does your organization respond to an actual disaster, one that can potentially destroy your business completely? Let’s take a look at some of the ways your organization can prepare for these circumstances to keep your organization from an unfortunate demise.

When you have a thorough and powerful data backup strategy in place at your business, you are protecting your operations, your employees, and your customers from an array of terrible scenarios. Unfortunately, many businesses don’t think of data loss in the terms it should be considered in, a complete travesty. Today, we thought we would briefly describe the long and short of data backup and recovery practices that can put your business in a position to secure and restore your data should it be corrupted, destroyed, or stolen.

A business’ data needs to be considered a priority, which means that its protection should be prioritized accordingly. One facet of doing so is maintaining a backup with a strategy in compliance to best practices. To accomplish this, your backup should feature something that isn’t often considered a benefit: redundancy.

Part of being a successful entrepreneur is having a positive mental attitude. After all, pessimists wouldn’t make it far. Stats, however, tell a story regardless of a business owner’s perception.  Statistically, most businesses will have to deal with some sort of “disaster”. That is: a situation where your business will be very much at risk. For this reason, we recommend BDR.

Tomorrow is World Backup Day, which--considering the current business climate as the coronavirus pandemic rages on--seems only too appropriate. Let’s discuss why times like these make it only too clear how critical a business continuity strategy is, especially when supported by the right backup solution.

There are a lot of things a business should have, that they hopefully won’t need. A few examples might include a fire extinguisher, a plunger, or a Backup and Disaster Recovery solution. Each of them are exceptionally important in their own way. Since today is World Backup Day, we’ll stick to discussing BDR.

A data loss incident is considered a major disaster scenario, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. All it takes is one moment to lose your business’s entire data infrastructure. We’ll walk you through a story that should serve as a cautionary tale, one that hopefully teaches you to adhere to data backup and disaster recovery best practices.

Marco Marsala, a hosting provider, posted on a server forum looking for advice on how to deal with a major issue he encountered while trying to delete a few files. He had utilized what’s called the “rm-rf” command with undefined variables, which wound up destroying all data on the system. Like any good hosting provider, he had backups of the files, but, like a dumb-dumb, he had the backups stored on the system that he accidentally wiped. What a mess.

This is actually a similar blunder to one that Pixar experienced, almost deleting Toy Story 2 prior to its release.

As a result of Marsala’s negligence, all of the data that his company had stored was destroyed. This included the data of 1,535 customers, whom he had built and hosted websites for. Without any backups stored off-site, he had no way to recover the data.

As you might expect, the responses that Marsala received from other users of the online forum were quite negative. Many completely dismissed the possibility that his company could recover from such a devastating failure, and others questioned his abilities as a hosting provider. One poster even went as far as recommending that Marsala seek legal counsel, rather than attempt to restore the data, predicting that Marsala was “going out of business.”

The conclusion: Marsala’s best chance of recovering from this major blow was to recruit help from a third-party data recovery firm. Fortunately for him, the company was able to recover his files, but that doesn’t change the fact that his simple mistake was a huge hit to his company’s finances. The company suffered from fees associated with the disaster recovery process, as well as reduced income from the loss of business suffered as a result of his negligence.

The lesson: neglecting to follow best practices got Marsala in some hot water, and his failure basically invited disaster to his doorstep. Following the accepted best practices of data recovery could have easily prevented the situation from escalating as quickly as it did. In fact, Marsala’s reason for distress (user error) is one of the most common reasons to use a backup and disaster recovery solution, a solution that stores your backups off-site on a separate system.

Storing your data off-site allows your organization to avoid the many causes of data loss, including user error, fires, electrical surges, hardware failure, theft, and so much more. This minimizes the risk of these events threatening your business’s operations.

How do you manage your business’s data backups? Are they stored off-site, and do you have a system in place to rapidly deploy them in the event of a major disaster? If you’re uncertain, reach out to Direct Technology Group at (954) 739-4700.

March 31st is World Backup Day! This occasion begs the question, “How much thought have you put into where your data is stored?” If you haven’t thought through your data storage options, then your files may be located in several different places. This could make accessing your data difficult, as well as jeopardize your network’s security. To get you started, let’s take a look at these four data storage options.