Disaster Recovery by Steadfast

Disaster Recovery – Necessary, but Affordable for All Businesses

Getting started with an IT disaster recovery plan is now very affordable (as low as $9.95/mo) and easier than ever.  There is no reason that any company that is highly dependent on electronic data should not have an in-depth IT disaster recovery plan, as it is no longer only applicable to the largest corporations. Right now, over 75% of small and medium businesses do not have a complete disaster recovery plan, and we want to fix that.  We want you to be prepared for the worst and are here to walk you through the entire process. Just contact our support department at sales@steadfast.net to get started today.  Just as you wouldn’t drive without auto insurance, you shouldn’t take the risk with your business and operate without a disaster recovery plan.

What is a disaster? 

If you’re not in an area prone to hurricanes, tornados, flooding, or earthquakes you may be thinking there is little need for a disaster recovery plan, but that isn’t the case.  In fact, only a small percent of disaster recovery needs stem from natural disasters.  The largest cause of data loss is mechanical/hardware malfunction or failure (44%), with the second largest cause being human error (32%) followed by software corruption/failure (14%) and computer viruses (7%) with natural disasters account for only 3% data loss.  A hard drive fails every 15 seconds, a computer is infected with a virus every 15 seconds, a laptop is lost or stolen once every 40 seconds (over half of all data is only kept on user systems), and major data loss due to hacking happens to a small or medium business three times a day.  These are every day occurrences that you need to be prepared for in addition to the possibility of a catastrophic natural disaster or terrorist attack.

What is the cost of data loss? 

The cost of major data loss could be your entire business, as 75% of small businesses that had no disaster recovery plan, go out of business within 3 years of a disaster.  This statistic can become clearly evident once you look at the amount of data your company relies upon on a daily basis, customer information, marketing information, invoices, financial data/records, payroll data, media files, vendor records, email/communications, planning diagrams, and the list is nearly endless.  For most businesses it would take many days, weeks, or months to restore this sort of data from scratch, if it can even be reassembled.  Over this time, your employees are unable to properly serve customers, your customers will begin looking at your competitors, you will not be able to produce your products/services, and you likely still won’t recover all the data in the end.  This loss of time, resources, and customers can be devastating for any business.

How do you prevent data loss? 

The easiest place to start is simply analyzing the critical data in your business and taking off site (you do not want your backup to be destroyed in the same power incident, burglary, or natural disaster as your primary data) backups of that data.  With Steadfast and our multiple data centers, you can get off-site hourly backups (we recommend making backups at least daily, but hourly is even better) of your data for less than $10/mo (for 20GB of data), and as your data needs increase, we can support almost an infinite number of systems (critical data could be spread across hundreds of backend servers or thousands of end user systems) and thousands of terabytes of data.  This will assure you that you always have a copy of your data in a highly reliable and secure  (SSAE16 audited) Steadfast data center, so if something happens to your primary data, you will still be able to retrieve it.  This data can be encrypted to assure your security requirements are met and we can support almost infinite retention schedules, allowing you to keep hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and annual backups.  If you need any help determining how much backup space you need, what data you should be backing, what backup schedule you should be running, or just need general pricing information our staff is more than happy to assist! Contact support@steadfast.net or call us at 888-281-9449. 

How do I recover from a data loss event? 

Since all of Steadfast’s backup services are done to live disks you will always have access to your backup data over the Internet, 24/7/365.  Wherever you are, whenever you need it, the data is immediately available to you.  There is no need to wait hours or days for a tape backup or hard drive to be called from storage (and then hoping it was stored properly and still works) or to go to one specific physical location.  If this data needs to be restored to a server, we always have servers in stock and could have you up and running on new servers (as little as $99.95/mo), with your restored data, within hours.  In addition, if you need local access to the data, our data centers are open and staffed 24/7.  How the data needs to be restored can often depend on your needs and the situation, but here at Steadfast we assure you have the utmost flexibility with fast Internet access, physical and virtual server (support for VMWare, Xen, KVM, and Hyper-V) options, local access, and even full geographic diversity to allow for almost live replication/restoration.  Talk with our knowledgeable staff via email at support@steadfast.net or on the phone at 888.281.9449 and we can assure you can get things back to normal as quickly as possible.

Steadfast Disaster Recovery and Server Backups are the Answer

I can’t go through all of the options, possibilities, and planning in this one post, but hopefully this has gotten you thinking about implementing or improving your existing IT disaster recovery plans. Disaster recovery services aren’t out of reach, we can make them affordable (as low as $9.95/mo for shared resources or $284.95/mo for dedicated resources) and easy for you. To keep your company going strong into the future, you need to prepare for the good, as well as the bad, and the team here at Steadfast can help you prepare for both.  Even if you’re currently not a customer, please contact us or email our support department at sales@steadfast.net and we’ll help you establish an IT disaster recovery plan at no charge.