Disaster Recovery Doesn’t Seem Important…Until It Suddenly Is
Deadly floods have ravaged eastern Kentucky in recent weeks, destroying homes and businesses and causing dozens of deaths. While there’s obviously no concern that compares to the threat to and loss of human life, many business owners in the affected areas will face a massive challenge in rebuilding their operations as they recover.
One issue some owners will have in the wake of the Kentucky floods is recovering data. Disaster recovery is one of those security essentials that doesn’t seem important…until it suddenly is. Every accounting firm should have a disaster recovery strategy as part of its greater security plan, but sometimes bad habits or forgetfulness can lead to even the best plans going awry when disaster strikes.
Downtime and Data Loss are Very Expensive
A 2019 LogicMonitor survey showed that 96% of businesses had experienced an outage in the three preceding years. The survey also revealed that half of those outages were avoidable.
Outages are expensive, too. A 2022 survey from Veeam pegged the cost of an outage at $1,467 per minute or $88,000 per hour.
Disasters often cause outages, which can devastate firms and other businesses. But in many cases, the companies that suffer outages don’t actually lose any data. They just don’t have access to it when they need it, which is bad enough on its own. However, losing the data itself is another issue altogether—and something a firm simply cannot afford to have happen.
Data Loss Can Happen Even When You Think it Can’t
You might think your backup strategy is sound enough to prevent data loss, and it might be. But are you sure? After all, employees can go rogue and save files on individual hard drives. Maybe you even slip occasionally and forget to save a critical file in a backed-up folder. Stress and the pace of work (and sometimes even a little sloppiness within your firm) can lead to disaster.
Consider a recent true story from Kentucky. It’s not from an accounting firm, but it’s scary nonetheless. An official from a church denomination received a call from a pastor in eastern Kentucky.
The pastor had stored all her sermons and writings—a lifetime of work—on an external hard drive, which sustained flood damage. Nothing was backed up anywhere else. It’s possible that the church official will be able to recover some files, but most, and possibly all, are gone forever.
It couldn’t happen in your firm, could it? Surely an unfortunate story from a church in Kentucky has no bearing on an accounting firm. But if you’re not backing up data in the cloud with a provider that minimizes downtime to the greatest extent possible, data loss could happen to you.
Reliable Cloud Backup is Essential for Data Protection
If you or an employee has client data saved on a hard drive, or if your backup provider is vulnerable to downtime, the next natural disaster could destroy some of your data forever. In any case, a catastrophic event could certainly lead to a frustrating—and costly—loss of business. The same goes for firms that back everything up on a locally hosted server in the office with no offsite data protection.
Most firms have some sort of cloud-based backup in place to avoid just such a scenario. But having the right cloud provider, one that can minimize downtime in the event of a disaster, is extremely important. And knowing that every last piece of data is backed up with a reliable partner—rather than sitting on a hard drive or a local office server—is essential.
Rightworks has two decades of experience backing up and recovering data. Our cloud hosting and Secure Workstation products contain everything your firm needs to withstand a disaster, including data storage in Tier 3 and 4 data centers, real-time data replication, and automatic backups. With Rightworks, your firm will be ready for whatever comes next.
Ready to back up your data and not have to worry? Get started here.
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