Initiate Disaster Recovery Procedures Before Hurricane Season Begins

initiate disaster recovery procedures before hurricane season begins

Although the official timeline for tropical storms in the United States only lasts from June 1 through December 1, savvy businesses up and down the East Coast in the Gulf States know that business preparations in the event of a tropical storm or hurricane hitting your area are an ongoing process.

As 2015 heads towards summer, it’s a good idea to review your disaster recovery procedures for hurricane season before bad weather actually hits.

Just a few years ago, many businesses simply backed up their data to external hard drives prior to hurricane season and hoped for a short outage once a tropical storm hit. However, what happens if you forget to grab the backup drive before leaving the office? These days disaster recovery for your business means much more than preserving files on a separate hard drive. Information on your entire server can be at risk along with your entire telephone system if you are using VoIP services.

AE Technology Group can provide protection of all business records and data. Our backup solutions include secure cloud or data center storage that can replicate your IT working environment and get you up and running as soon as its safe to return to the premises following the storm. Getting your networks up and running as soon as possible following a natural disaster will minimize losses to your business and keep customers happy.

Cloud and other backup solutions that are suitable for disaster recovery are not just for large corporations.

Contact us today before a hurricane hits to learn how we put customized disaster recovery procedures in place that can ultimately save money.

How to Backup Data to the Cloud

how to backup data to the cloud
cloud backup

We’ve heard a bit of confusion concerning how to back data up to the cloud. In this blog we’ll walk you through the process to show you how simple it really is.

First, you’ll need:

  • A set of data
  • Cloud storage
  • A willingness to take the next step

That’s really all it takes to backup data to the cloud. If you’ve already covered all the prerequisites, then we’ll move onto the first step:

Create a Plan

It’s possible, yet unwise to just start backing data up to the cloud without having a clear plan. We strongly recommend against it.

When you create your plan, you need to discuss various topics, such as:

  • How much cloud storage you need
  • What data you’ll back up to the cloud
  • Who will be able to access the data in your cloud
  • Where your data will be stored (with reference to a data center)

Do you see why you need a plan now? If you just randomly back data up, you’ll have to deal with these issues when you’re not ready for them.

Organize Your Data

After you create a plan, you need to organize your data. The reason for this is that you need a way to find information in your cloud easily. If all your files are scattered, then presentations will be mixed with videos and income statement spreadsheets will be mixed with digital brand designs, etc. You can avoid this mess by organizing your data first.

Back Your Data Up

Now comes the fun part. After you’ve created a plan and organized your data, you can back it up to the cloud.

Don’t be worried if you find this to be the easiest step. Assuming you prepared your data properly, backing it up is relatively easy. Just follow the directions provided by your cloud provider.

Set Up a Backup Schedule

Unfortunately, you can’t just stop there. It wouldn’t make sense to back your data up and never do it again — unless you just want to have old data in your cloud.

The good news is that you can set up a backup schedule so you don’t have to do everything all over again. Automatic backups ensure that your data is always up-to-date in case you need to restore it.

To talk more about backing data up to the cloud, or anything else, please contact us. Thanks.

Disaster Recovery and Backup: Make New Technology Work for You

A 2012 study done by Gartner found that business continuity was the number one reason for a business to decide on virtualization.

This disaster recovery and backup solutions plan should include at least three considerations, which are addressed in this post. It is important to know that almost 75 percent of businesses that virtualized saw measurable improvement in their ability to recover from either natural or man made disasters.

Data is King

If you need a reason to think about virtualization for your business, keep in mind that data is king. Machines can be restored and applications reinstalled, but care is a requirement for data. Without the data, you could be up and running with nothing to do.

Data protection is a top priority. It must be safe from destruction and loss, which allows for quick recovery after a disaster. The care you give to data will determine the survival of your small business. Virtual storage plays a vital role in data preservation.

Plans for Infrastructure

Take a good look at your hardware and decide how your business could survive if this hardware / server structure experiences damage of any kind. Server virtualization shortens restoration time to the maximum of four hours because most of the work is done offsite – by someone else. This means you don’t have to rebuild any servers, applications or operating systems.

Each server is an independent information container, which can easily be up and running without intense work. It takes only a small collection of tools to convert physical hardware to virtual machinery that will be able to take the place of servers if they become non-functional. This needs to be part of your plan for business continuity under adverse conditions.

Consider a Consolidation

Consolidation is a term that means doing more with less. You could be running more virtual machines (VM) on less servers. This allows you to streamline your business recovery and follow up with a standard plan that you will always use in any disaster situation.

When you decide to take action, contact us to get a better understanding of the risks you must consider: floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, seasonal bursts of traffic to your website. Only then can you put a plan in place to deal with those potential risks. There are more benefits of virtualization, but these are the ones to consider before making a decision.

Automatic Online Backup: How can the cloud help keep my data safe and secured?

Clouds

For those of you who still don’t know, the term cloud computing can mean many things. The easiest way to describe it would be as a group of services that are available to you whenever and wherever an Internet connection is available.

An online backup refers to one of these cloud services that lets you take a copy of your personal files from your PC, Mac, or mobile device and store it in another secure location in “the cloud”. The benefit of this is two-fold. One so that you can access these files from any location with an Internet connection, and two so that in the event that your system fails your files remain safe.

Backing up has been a process that many home users and small business have always dreaded. Until now it has been confusing, and probably has left you wondering what files to back up, what media to put it on? You no longer need CD/DVDs, flash drives that get lost, external hard drives that are slow and fail; you have the cloud!

A quick setup ensures that all your data is backed up, and can be restored in no time in the event of a disaster. You can chose to back up in real time, or you can set automatic online backup in which, once selected, regularly and automatically backs up that data without any further user interaction.

Backing up has never been easier thanks to the cloud, and now AE Technology Group can integrate cloud solutions for you.

Call us at (877) 771-AETG to discuss options or e-mail us!