Business continuity planning is the process or methodology by which operations can continue despite an adverse event such as hardware failure, fire, flood, or theft.  This is often the most overlooked and under budgeted part of many small and medium business IT systems.  We have a simple mandate that every company can apply to their business continuity and backup strategy for guaranteed success.

Our backup philosophy - "The only good backup is one that you perform daily, store offsite, and test regularly."

In lay terms this means you should run a backup every day that your business is open.  A copy of the backup should be stored offsite by either cloud storage or physically taking the backup device offsite.  Lastly the backup should be tested on a regular monthly schedule at a minimum.

The current IT landscape offers a variety of methods that you can use to backup your data.  Shown below are the most popular methods.

• Removable storage devices including USB, eSata, Firewire, and Thunderbolt - (Good)
• Cloud based backup - (Better)
• Purpose built Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) appliances - (Best)

There is no one size fits all strategy for backup and disaster recovery.