How to Guarantee Your Small Business Backup Solutions Are Safe

In part 1 of our multipart series, we contemplated the potential weak points in small business backup solutions existing just outside of most of our awareness. Protecting data alone isn’t enough. You need to be just as vigilant when protecting your servers, PC hardware, PBXs/Telco/ISP systems, and even paper documentation. But beyond building awareness, what needs to be done?

In this next part, we will be delving into industry best practices for small business backup solutions that will help prevent your business from drastically falling behind in the wake of a disaster.

• Servers and PCs

Establish backups early and often. All of KME’s numerous clients enjoy the safety provided by a twice daily backup, preventing them from ever having to regress to data, configuration, and programming from weeks, months, or even years ago.

Even if a server literally catches on fire, we’ll put it out and restore 100% of its functionality in minutes. No weeks spent waiting on repairs or replacements. That’s something that should be done (and is done by our team) for critical PCs as well. For the KME Systems team, this speed of server/PC rebound comes about thanks to a proprietary appliance specifically tuned for business continuity. Anything less can put those vital pieces in jeopardy.

Additionally, it’s become an industry best practice to push all of that data to the cloud. We do it via a continually encrypted data session to ensure authentication cannot be breached or bypassed in the process of saving clients’ data. Even if their building burns down, within a few hours we can restore all servers in the cloud with their most recent data.

Best of all for KME’s clients, we continually test our backup appliance for peak and perfect operation. Nothing is left unchecked for more than a few hours. It may be our client’s data, but we treat it like our own. That’s what you should expect from any company protecting your data. Without exception.

• Phone Systems

As we discussed last time, when your local telco system experiences an outage and your clients can’t reach you, it’s not of a confidence builder for them. When your telecommunications and/or premise based phone systems implode – due to bad hard drives, memory, or other internal components – you wouldn’t assume recovery can happen with the snap of your fingers.

That’s all changed with modern telecom setups and virtualized systems.

At KME, we long ago devised a cloud based system that can recover phone systems the minute they fail. A call can then be re-routed to any phone in the world, giving our clients the freedom to circumvent problems that would hurt their competition.

Many firms today have caught up with that service, so you should definitely ask your current service provider to get this set up. It’s an inexpensive and very powerful way to keep your phones ringing (even when fate seems to conspire against you)!

• Paper Records

We all have paper records, but do we all protect them? It’s becoming easier and more economical with each passing year. Firms like Iron Mountain have specific abilities to protect not only your paper records, but protect anything you put in their offsite storage centers for safekeeping.

They deliver boxes to your office for you to fill, and haul them all away to be sealed up in secure storage. When you need the box back, you schedule delivery and it will show up right away. Firms like this even specialize in specific compliance areas as well, so healthcare and financial records can be stored properly.

No more worrying about filing cabinets being vulnerable to water and fire damage or taking up room in valuable office spaces.

• Testing

We ended part one with a focus on testing and we’re going to do it again. This is something we cannot emphasize enough. Small business backup solutions aren’t complete unless you run them through the rigors of serious and frequent testing.

Another benefit is that it allows you to determine what you are missing so that your operations can shift to suit your needs. Remember: a small step that you skip now could spell disaster when you need to pull the ripcord for your backup parachute. Do you really want to leave your servers, PCs, PBX/telecom, and other technical left up to chance by bad backup solutions?

Have a specific question? Not sure what to do next? KME Systems can advance your small business backup solutions to a level that compares with your own commitment to excellence. Reach out to us (it’s what we do for a living)!