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4 Scenarios to Consider On Disaster Preparedness Day

b2ap3_thumbnail_business_sabotage_400.jpgSeptember was National Disaster Preparedness Month, and as such, it’s important to consider the state of your business’s current backup and disaster recovery practices. Different disasters pose various threats for your organization, but many of them have one thing in common: they’re going to ruin your physical IT infrastructure, and, depending on your backup practices, could potentially bring down your entire operational infrastructure.

Here are four of the most common natural disasters that drastically affect IT systems, and what you can do to prevent them from causing permanent damage.

Power Outages
Fierce storms are often enough to cause quite a bit of damage to businesses that haven’t taken the proper precautions. If power lines go down, you run the risk of losing electricity. This could result in your machines unexpectedly powering down, and you losing information or even causing damage to the hardware. Using an uninterrupted power supply, or UPS, can help to keep your systems up and running long enough to save any files that are being worked on. This helps to prevent damage from unexpected power-downs.

Floods and Tropical Storms
Again, storms, hurricanes, and heavy rainfall in general is enough to create problems for businesses along the coast, on bodies of water, or near rivers. Unexpected flooding is enough to cause extensive water damage, wash out foundations of buildings, and, of course, fry any technology it comes into contact with. This means that floods can potentially cost your business in not just physical repairs to your building, but also in replacing vital hardware systems.

To avoid water damage to your office’s equipment, consider placing your vital technology components in an elevated location, away from the floor. This will help keep them safe from a couple inches of water, if the flood infiltrates your building. Still, the best way to prepare for flood damage is to keep an off-site backup of your data infrastructure. This makes sure that your data isn’t wiped out by an unpredictable natural disaster.

Earthquakes
Earthquakes have the potential to be even more devastating for businesses, especially if you’re located somewhere that is known to experience periodic violent quakes. With the power to level entire buildings, your business could be at constant risk of both physical infrastructure damage and data loss.

Implementing a reliable backup and disaster recovery solution is required if you want to ensure that your data is safely stored off-site, somewhere earthquakes shouldn’t be able to reach it. You can also switch to cloud computing and virtualization tactics for your primary mode of data and application distribution, which decreases the amount of physical infrastructure networking you need to stay productive.

Fires
Just like earthquakes, a fire is one of the more damaging disasters that could hit your business. If your building were to catch fire, there’s a risk of everything you hold dear being destroyed: data, hardware, and even your physical location. Thankfully, you can at least save your data from destruction by using a backup and disaster recovery solution.

These are only a few disasters that could strike your business’s IT infrastructure. If you want to optimize your chances of making it through disasters like these unscathed, give NuTech Services a call at 810.230.9455 for more information about our backup and disaster recovery solutions.

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Got Big Plans for World Backup Day? You Should

b2ap3_thumbnail_world_backup_day_4_400.jpgInternet users today are a little spooked, and for good reason. Stories of major hacks seem to perpetually be in the headlines. A hack attack can lead to stolen or compromised data, which is why backing up data is a crucial piece of every business continuity plan. For this purpose, World Backup Day 2015, March 31st, is an important day.

The goal of World Backup Day is to have everyone in the world back up their data. In fact, there’s even an official website for WBD where you can take a data backup pledge and then share it on social media. “I solemnly swear to backup my important documents and precious memories on March 31st.” Ultimately, the point of WBD is to get everyone to consider how often they back up their data so that they will implement measures to do it more frequently.

One important aspect about WBD is that it highlights the need to back up all of your data. Business owners in particular need to take this message to heart because they have a tendency to spread out important business-related files across their personal devices, like their home PC and smartphone. This is a dangerous move, due to the fact that a business owner may have an efficient data backup solution for their company’s network, but not for their personal data. If something were to happen to their personal device that compromises its data, and the only copy of a business-related file was on the lost or stolen device, then the company would experience a major setback. This is why it’s crucial for all of your data to be backed up, not just the data on your company’s server units.

In honor of World Backup Day, here are two recommended backup solutions for your personal data backup needs.

An External Hard Drive
One popular consumer backup solution is the external hard drive. These drives can be found at virtually every electronics store and at an affordable cost of around $100 for a whopping one terabyte of storage space. 1TB should be plenty for the average computer user’s personal needs; it’s enough space for approximately 750,000 MP3s or photos, or 230 movies.

The Cloud
The versatility of the cloud provides consumers with a host of computing options, including data backup. Popular consumer cloud backup solutions include Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Apple’s iCloud, and much more. All of these services are offered at affordable rates. The cloud is proving to be the preferred backup solution to the external hard drive because it allows users to automatically backup and sync all of their devices, which is much more convenient than having to take time and connect a device with a hard drive.

However, one aspect about consumer cloud solutions is that, while they’re great for personal computing needs, they fall short when it comes to serving the data needs of businesses. NuTech Services’s cloud computing solution is designed to fit the computing needs of enterprises like your own. Plus, we can take the time to safely integrate your company’s cloud solution with your personal devices.

Backup and Disaster Recovery from NuTech Services
There is no greater way to honor World Backup Day than getting the ultimate data backup and recovery solution for your business, BDR. NuTech Services’s BDR solution can be customized to specifically meet the needs of your business, and it’s easy to manage. In fact, BDR automatically backs up your data, meaning that you won’t have to oversee the process or even remember to do it. Essentially, if enough businesses implement BDR, then World Backup Day would no longer be a thing, since no one would ever need a data backup reminder. As sad as that would be to no longer have a WBD, it would be worth it if it meant that all of the world’s data would be secure.

So, what are your plans for World Backup Day? If you’ve got BDR, then this day is cause for celebration because you’ll feel good about your data being secure. To celebrate World Backup Day with NuTech Services’s BDR and cloud computing solutions, give us a call at 810.230.9455.