Protecting a business from natural disasters and unwanted trespassers will probably come as second nature. But in the age of a digital revolution, protecting data from cyber intrusion, human error and data loss need to be top of the agenda for all businesses.

The backup plan

Gartner predicts there will be 6.8 billion connected devices in use this year, jumping to 20 billion connected devices in 2020. As reliance on digital devices grows, businesses need to safeguard critical data against potential site-wide disasters that could threaten both the primary and backup data.

Implementing a disaster recovery and backup plan is crucial to each organisation’s business continuity; protecting against reputational damage that comes from exposing vulnerabilities to data management but also ensuring compliance with industry regulations. Ultimately, a disaster recovery solution is developed with the aim of saving a business from closing its doors for good.

Worryingly, less than one third of organisations report to have a fully documented disaster recovery strategy in place. This is a real concern, with almost half of SMBs (42%) believing their company's plans are insufficient to cope, and only 30% thinking information would actually be recoverable in the event of a disaster.

With the increase in flexible working and growth of the connected office, threats are only continuing to develop. This could be from cyber-attack, requirements coming from regulatory compliance or the burden of competitors – all of which are putting increasing pressures on SMBs in this digital age.

Facing the threats of the digital landscape

With data increasingly being stored and transferred digitally, the risk of cyber breaches is deemed to be at an all-time high. If zero-day viruses, Cryptolocker-type trojans or ransomware hit data could be at risk of permanent damage.

Field tests suggest that with a holistic recovery and backup system in place, downtime is minimised, impact on lost revenue is reduced and associated costs are limited.

We protect our bodies from avoidable viruses, so we should replicate this preventative measure in our networks too. Businesses need to act now and bring in a disaster recovery plan for their networks that can prevent rather than trying to cure data loss or corruption when it’s too late.

Considering that business disasters commonly derive from either hardware failure, human or software error, a holistic approach to disaster recovery and storage protection ensures that vital files and systems don’t suffer from long-term damage. Data insurance is as crucial as insuring your health or your home.

Benefitting from a holistic approach

Such a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) strategy can maintain employee productivity and a business’s ability to generate revenue. If implemented at the right time, minimised downtime coming from the agile security of Disaster Recovery as a Service helps to preserve a business’s reputation with customers and partners whilst preventing a business from losing out to competitors.

Compliance with industry regulations also helps to avoid service level agreement penalties for non-compliance or non-performance. A managed solution for businesses provides constant access across multiple locations, which can backup all data every 15 minutes.

> See also: Are enterprises taking business continuity seriously?

With efficient, continuous backups that can be reliably restored to any platform, businesses can benefit from making cost savings on capacity and bandwidth, as well as easy offsite storage and recovery. Such a managed service enables businesses to have confidence in the protection of its data whilst reducing the need for management time. Investing in a Disaster Recovery as a Service solution saves time and expenditure in the long run.

With the Disaster Recovery as a Service market expected to grow considerably by 2020, protecting virtual business data needs to be as important as protecting your physical business to ensure business continuity.

Sourced from Peter Hannah, Regional Director of UK, Ireland and Nordics, NETGEAR