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eGUIDE 2 (855) ONE-NECK | www.OneNeck.com Of those IT professionals polled, 64 percent say that data loss is literally a life and death situa on for small businesses, and 71 percent say they have to achieve data recovery within 24 hours. That's why 72 percent of businesses are inves ng in business con nuity tools over the next two years, including backup systems. So if you take the view that a data disaster is not just possible but inevitable, your next step is to determine what types of disaster recovery solu ons are best suited to your business needs. Cour ng Disaster There are many causes of data loss, and very few have to do with natural disaster. Most IT professionals (65 percent) feel that technology faults are the leading cause of data disaster, while 60 percent a ribute data loss to man-made disasters, and 59 percent a ribute security issues. In fact, 65 percent of data disasters are man-made, 29 percent are from technology failures and 22 percent from security breaches. No ma er what the nature of the data loss, there are only limited measures you can take to prevent a disaster. You have to implement safeguards and protocols but with the understanding that things happen, so you need a data recovery strategy as well as data loss preven on protocols. When planning for disaster recovery, there are two criteria that are most important: 1. having a complete set of business-cri cal backup data and 2. being able to restore the data quickly. When it comes to data backup and recovery, most IT professionals consider strategies such as granular file backup and restore, bare metal backup and restore, local failover, hybrid data copies and data encryp on, both because they provide complete data sets and can restore data access fast. One of the primary considera ons is whether to store backup data on premise or off premise. Although 91 percent of organiza ons currently use on-premise backup, an increasing number are looking for off-premise op ons, including storing data at a loca on they own (44 percent) or at hosted site (29 percent), with a growing trend toward cloud DR or hybrid data storage. Cloud Disaster Recovery More businesses are turning to the cloud for services and data storage. Core business applica ons such as payroll, email and customer rela onship management work well as cloud service solu ons, and 80 percent of businesses say they have adopted some form of So ware as a Service (SaaS) applica on.

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