Nobody likes to think about disasters, but they do happen–and usually at the most inconvenient times. Disasters come in all types and sizes: a fire in a neighbouring suite that spreads to your office; a police action that prevents your staff from coming to work one day; a “snow day”; or a pandemic. Two questions that a business owner needs to ask are:

1. “If a disaster hits, how long can I be without my IT systems?” How long can you go without key systems and information you need to service your customers and keep your business running? Is it an hour, a half day, or a maybe even a full day? This is known in disaster planning as the “Recovery Time Objective” or RTO. Without any plan at all, it is likely that it will take a week or more to replace hardware or attempt to recover whatever backups you might have. In almost all cases, this time to recover from a disaster exceeds your RTO and the expectations of your customers.
2. “If a disaster hits, how current do I need my data to be at the time that it is recovered?” Once your systems are restored, how old can the data be before the actual disaster event? If your current backup process takes a snapshot at the end of the day, or the end of the week, there’s a lot of business information that can be lost in a disaster. In the panic of the moment, no one will remember the work they were doing just before the alarm sounded. An end-of-day backup cycle means that you can lose 6-7 hours of work products, emails, orders, and other transactions if a disaster strikes midday. This lapsed time between your last backup and the disaster event is the “Recovery Point Objective” (RPO).

Atlas Solutions has cost-effective backup tools and strategies that can provide RPOs between 30 minutes and 8 hours, and RTO’s that can get your business running again between 1 and 2 hours. And it can all be set up so that the backups are seamless and happen in the background without any concern or attention from you. Like any insurance plan, a disaster recovery program from our business data and systems is not something we like to thing about, but some day most of us will be glad we did.