Read about the economic impact of recent natural disasters, and how offsite backups ensure business continuity through any storm. Move to the cloud today!
Natural disasters cause data loss. Data dependent businesses can’t afford a total data loss, and therefore must look out for the most likely culprits when assembling a data recovery plan. While some threats come and go, a fixture on the data destruction ‘Most Wanted’ list is Mother Nature.
Her tantrums can come in the form of extreme weather such as hurricanes, blizzards, floods, heat waves, droughts, lightning strikes, tornadoes, and tsunamis. They can also include non-weather events like volcanoes, mudslides, earthquakes, and wildfires.
According to the National Archives & Records Administration (NARA), if a business lost access to their data for 10 or more days after a disaster, that business has a 93% chance of filing for bankruptcy within a year.
Mother Nature is a force to be reckoned with, oblivious to what’s in her path and wielding enough power to destroy it all. From big storms like hurricanes to forest fires, to smaller events that snowball into bigger issues, in a single moment Mother Nature can alter your entire livelihood.
Everything is on the line, from your personal life to your business. Although natural disasters account for only 3% of data loss, their impact can easily be the most devastating. Because natural disasters have a tendency to wreak havoc on a business’ entire arsenal of technology, including flash drives and other local backups, it’s often impossible to recover the data if it’s not properly backed-up offsite.
Recent Natural Disasters
From powerful earthquakes in Indonesia to forceful flooding in Japan, to a bursting volcano in Guatemala to the drought induced wildfires in California, thousands of people have lost their lives to natural disasters in 2018.
While the death toll is stunning, these natural disasters have had an equally crippling economic impact. According to NARA, natural disasters cost $160 billion in damages in 2018, the fourth-costliest year in history, only half of which was insured.
The worst storms of 2018 were Hurricane Michael and Florence, which touched down in the U.S., and Typhoons Jebi, Signal 10 Mangkhut, and Trami, which bludgeoned Asia. In 2018 alone, there were 29 natural disasters with a price tag of at least $1 billion.
Major natural disasters reduce regional economic growth for decades. The effects of a natural disaster don’t go away overnight. Recovering is a process that takes years. When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, it cost the U.S. territory’s economy $43 billion.
Infrastructure has to be rebuilt, from roads and bridges to electric, gas, and sewage lines. Business owners who aren’t covered by insurance are likely to go belly-up, or are forced to move their business away.
If a business only stores its data locally, and fails to backup extra copies offsite, that data would face the same fate as the hardware that stores it. That means an event as common as a power surge could spell disaster for a data dependent business.
Offsite Backups Ensure Business Continuity After a Natural Disaster
A way to make sure business data isn’t lost in a natural disaster is to backup all files and documents offsite to an online backup service. The best data recovery process includes an additional copy of all business-critical data safely stored to an offsite data center that faces fewer natural threats than the business.
Unlike physical disk drives and tapes that have to be shipped across the country, cloud backups services use the Internet to transfer data to a remote data center. This allows for immediate access from any device, rather than waiting on a delivery (assuming the disaster hasn’t halted the mail service).
On top of never crashing or burning-out, cloud storage services offer unlimited capacity, making for greater storage space than traditional backups. Because of these modern conveniences, 78% of small businesses will use the cloud to backup their data by 2020.
Central Data Storage Makes Moving to the Cloud a Breeze
At CDS, our top-priority is making sure our customer’s data is always backed-up and secure. Our fully-supported backup and recovery solution, UnisonBDR, has helped businesses affected by recent hurricanes get back up-and-running within a day. In the event of a disaster, we will work to recover all data as quickly as possible, typically within 24 hours.
From setting up each account and completing the initial backup, to monitoring each account and sending daily backup statuses, to making sure the restore is successful – we do it all while being 100% compliant with government regulations.
We know day-to-day business life can be hectic, and the craziness is only amplified following a natural disaster. At a time like that, a data backup plan and recovery procedure is likely the last thing a business owner wants to be thinking about.
Let us do the thinking! Be confident your data can survive Mother Nature’s wrath.
Ready to start living the cloud life? Try UnisonBDR today!