With stories of cybercrime hitting the headlines on what appears to be a daily basis, burying one’s head in the sand over data loss is no longer an option. This is real. Organisations both large and small are continuously being hit with increasingly sophisticated variations of cybercrime designed to cause major disruption.

If your business became a victim of cybercrime – how quickly would you recover your data?

Implementing a Disaster Recovery Plan

When you start to think about business insurance and implementing an IT disaster recovery plan, it is usual to consider unlikely events, such as a fire or a flood. In reality, a robust disaster recovery plan is also required for the increasingly likely event in which your business is the victim of cybercrime.

Deciding on the right disaster recovery solution for your business, depends upon what is known in the industry as the RTO (Recovery Time Objective). This simply means, the desired time it takes to completely recover and get back up and running again, following a data loss.

Backing Up Business Data with M2 Assist

With the M2 Assist IT support plan, we implement an on-site back-up solution all customers. All servers are imaged to a local NAS device every night. This enables us to restore files and bring servers back online with the previous night’s image in the event of data loss.

It is also necessary to have an additional layer of off-site back up. We encourage all customers to opt for a cloud or hybrid cloud solution for off-site back up protection rather than tapes. Tapes are cumbersome and unreliable. It can take a long time to restore data from a tape and in our experience, there are occasions when despite the software reporting a successful back-up, there is nothing on the tape.

M2 Cloud Business Continuity Solutions

There are varying levels back up support available on the market of depending on your budget level and the desired RTO (Recovery Time Objective). When choosing a provider, it is important to understand where your data is stored. We will only implement solutions from reputable partners with strict SLAs (Service Level Agreements) in place, backing up your data up to either a tier III or tier IV data centre.

M2 Cloud Back Up

Our M2 Cloud Back Up service provides specialist, expert disaster recovery and business continuity with cutting-edge, military-grade 448-bit encryption. Your data is hosted in UK-based data centres for complete security, resiliency and compliance. This solution is calculated on cost per GB stored per month, so you only pay for the storage you use. This also provides economies of scale with the ability to grow with your business needs.

Datto SIRIS from M2

If your business heavily relies on up to the minute data to operate, then you will require a higher performance solution with minimal recovery time. Datto is the market leader for fully integrated business continuity solutions. The Datto SIRIS provides full server imaging with snapshot intervals as frequently as every 5 minutes.

With secure local virtualization solutions, like Datto Siris, if you experience data loss, your entire infrastructure is virtualized instantly, empowering you to continue your business operations without losing any data and incurring minimal downtime. There is the cost of a physical appliance and then an ongoing service fee which includes an allocation of cloud data. Once this is exceeded there is an additional charge per Terabyte.

Security in the Cloud with Office 365

Most people think of Office 365 as the productivity tool that gives them anywhere access to their email and office documents. It is easy to forget that this subscription based cloud service also comes with the reassurance that all your files and documents are hosted by thousands of servers across 4 data centres in Europe providing a highly secure back up environment.

As robust as this sounds, Microsoft’s infrastructure is designed to protect technology and processes. They do not accommodate for human error or the ever-increasing threat of malicious intent.  People often delete data. In fact, 75% of all data loss is due to people deleting content either intentionally or by accident.  To protect your business against these incidents, we would highly recommend an extra layer of back up protection.

We recommend SkyKick Cloud Backup to our clients, offering complete peace of mind protecting your business from data loss caused by human error or intent when deploying Office 365 Exchange Online, SharePoint and OneDrive. This is available for just £2.60 per user per month.

Determining your business RTO (Recovery Time Objective)

Ultimately the right back up and disaster recovery solution will depend on how critical it is for your business to be back up and running following a data loss. To calculate the RTO, consider the following questions; Operationally how much does it cost for your systems to be down? How does it affect your employees? What is the financial impact on your organisation? Not only for the short term, but also consider the long-term impact on your brand reputation. Once you have calculated this figure per minute, you will know the true cost of downtime for your business and the level of investment you are willing to make to minimise the impact of a cyber-attack or disaster situation.

Speak to a member of our team on 01293 871971 or email enquiries@m2computing.co.uk to organise an assessment of your current disaster recovery plan.