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Top 10 items SMBs need to back up

AUTHOR | Joshua Turack @ThinkSpace IT

Backups, everyone has them and many people don't understand the value. That ism until it doesn't work when it is needed, and then it may be too late. According to Price Waterhouse Coopers, as many as 15,000 hard drives fail every day. But if you haven’t personally experienced a failure it’s difficult to understand how disastrous even just one failed hard drive can be. For many modern SMBs, vast amounts of data crucial to their everyday operation is left vulnerable to hard drive failure or other forms of data loss because they don’t have a good backup solution. In fact, 94% of companies that suffer catastrophic data loss are forced to close their doors within two years (PWC). For the companies that do recover, the median cost per day of downtime is $12,500 in lost revenue (PWC).

Garrison Data Secure, our premier cloud backup solution, protects you from these risks and, in the case of a hard drive failure, we’ll get you back up and running quickly, limiting your downtime and saving you a lot of hassle. There’s ten main types of data which are essential to backup.

Line of Business (LOB) Applications - Line of business applications are the programs which are fundamental to your daily operation like QuickBooks or Peachtree. The data associated with these programs, like most of your other data, is irreplaceable. Having this data regularly backed up ensures that you can quickly return to normal operation after a data loss.

Emails - Your email is a record of conversations you’ve had with other businesses or with your clients. This information is important to have backed up in case a dispute arises over a past conversation or you just need to go back and review what was agreed on in a conversation. We have all lost emails before, wouldn’t it be nice if you could get them back! Garrison Data Secure can restore your mailbox and even just get the one email that was lost or deleted!

Client Records - Your client records contain confidential information from your clients and other data related to them. You most likely use this information every day. If this data is unprotected and you were to lose it in a system crash, hard drive failure, or due to an accidental deletion, your company’s reputation would suffer and much of the data would be unrecoverable. Garrison Data Secure protects you from this risk by keeping multiple revisions of your data so that even if you don’t notice that your data is missing for a while we can still recover it from the last time you had a good copy of it.

Virtual Machines - If you use virtualization technology such as Hyper-v or VMware to host your servers, you need a good backup solution to protect you in case a virtual machine crashes or even if the virtual host experiences issues. Garrison does this smoothly and efficiently with built-in tools designed specifically for virtual machine backups. We are able to quickly restore a single virtual machine or get all your servers back up and running very quickly if your virtual host fails.

Point of Sale (POS) Systems - A POS system, such as a cash register or other payment system, is a critical part of your day to day operations. Therefore, if your POS system goes down you’ll start to lose potential business right away. The more complex your system is, the longer it would take to rebuild it if the POS wasn’t backed up properly. Besides that, you run the risk of losing transaction records if you have to rebuild your POS from scratch. With Garrison Data Secure we are able to restore your system and get you back to normal operation in no time.

Financial & Accounting Applications - Your accounting or finance software is yet another component of your daily operations that should be backed up on a daily basis. This data is irreplaceable and the aftermath of a data loss on the machine that houses this software is difficult to recover from. Garrison Data Secure can protect your financial software and databases and make it easier to recover from a failure and maintain continuity in your financial records.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software - CRM software is what you use to monitor you interactions with your customers and track your marketing programs. This software is essential to creating future business for your company and keeping your existing customers happy. This software contains statistics and data that you can’t replace. A good backup solution is fundamental to maintaining a good relationship with your clients and keeping things running smoothly.

Electronic Medical Record Systems - HIPPA requirements include implementing a data backup plan and a disaster recovery plan. Garrison Data Secure can help your organization meet these and other HIPPA compliance requirements. With Garrison your data is backed up offsite to military-grade facilities. The backup solution encrypts your data so it is protected from corruption and unauthorized access.

Servers & Workstations - Your servers and workstations contain files and applications that you use for your everyday business. If you lose these files you need to be able to quickly recover them. If your server fails or your PC crashes Garrison Data Secure is able to return your system to the way it was before the failure with minimal downtime.

Files & Folders - Files and folders is the data category that most people probably think of when they think about needing to have a backup solution. Whether you store your files on a file server or on your workstation, if they aren’t protected by a backup solution, you run the risk of losing all different kinds of data. Garrison Data Secure provides a simple method of backing up these files so that you are protected in case of a disaster.

It is crucial to have a good backup solution for these types of data. If you’re interested in learning more about Garrison Data Secure you can find more information here www.thinkspaceit.net/backups.html.