When we map out a network for a business, a huge factor that goes into the decision-making process is about the data that travels across the network. Your organization’s data, and it’s security and continuity, is extremely important. In fact, we feel it’s one of the most important aspects of your business.
Your Data is More Than Just Your Documents
It’s not uncommon for someone to think about their company’s data as just their documents. Depending on your industry, that might consist of your sales and marketing brochures, invoice/quote templates, presentations, meeting notes, scanned signed documents, and more. After all, at home, for most users, your data mostly consists of music, videos, photos, and other documents. Most home users can just store all of those files on a separate hard drive or on a cloud service and be in pretty good shape as far as data redundancy goes.
For businesses, it gets more complicated pretty quickly. Do you use a line of business app to track inventory or production? Do you have a CRM tool to track customer engagement and sales opportunities? Does your industry have compliance standards where you need to retain records of certain information for a certain amount of time?
All of your software applications that your employees use tend to store data in their own way; some might use a database on your server, others might let you export the data into a kind of spreadsheet called a CSV, and some might have even less conventional means.
Let’s use Quickbooks as an example. All throughout the week, your staff is managing the information in Quickbooks to manage and pay bills, handle payroll, etc. If you were to log into Quickbooks one day and find all of that data missing, you could be in some serious trouble, and in a best-case scenario, have to spend hours and hours re-populating it.
If Quickbooks is only storing the data in one place, and it isn’t getting backed up, you are out of luck.
You have data within these applications that needs to be backed up and stored redundantly, and done so automatically so it happens without fail every single day.
Sometimes, we’ve even seen cases where these types of applications just get installed on a single workstation and have all of their data only stored on that one computer or laptop as opposed to centralized on a company server. A year or two later, if that user gets an upgrade or leaves the company and their local data is purged, it’s only then discovered that the software wasn’t set up correctly in the first place.
It’s critical to understand where all of these pieces are being stored, and ensuring that they are being backed up.
How confident are you in your business continuity? Unless you are 110 percent certain that every single piece of company information is being stored redundantly both at your location and in an offsite location, your data backup situation needs to be evaluated. Even if you are 110 percent confident in your backup, it’s worth having a separate set of eyes look upon it. Reach out to Business Solutions & Software Group today and let’s talk about your business continuity.
