RenovoData was featured in the 3PL Perspectives publication with this article by Chuck Cook: “The Race to Reduce Downtime“. 3PL Perspectives is a third-party logistics magazine provided by the Transportation Intermediaries Association.

An excerpt is below:

“Business continuity planning is essential in protecting your organization from disasters. Due to the time-sensitive nature of logistics operations, 3PLs cannot afford prolonged downtime. Businesses without a comprehensive plan lack the resilience to endure a substantial data loss incident, and often underestimate the time required to restore operations.”

You can read the complete article, “The Race to Reduce Downtime“.

Data is an invaluable business asset, and protecting against a data disaster has become an essential part of business continuity planning. Most companies are simply unable to withstand damages caused by a significant data loss event – and many do not realize that restoring operations can take a matter of weeks, not days, depending on the nature of the disaster and the backup & recovery solutions you have in place.

From the moment a data failure occurs, every minute of downtime is a threat to your organization’s future; it shakes the confidence of customers, employees, and investors. A rapid and reasoned response is your business’s best course forward, and without proper preparation, you could suffer irreparable harm.

It’s estimated that when small-to-medium businesses without a disaster recovery strategy or plan suffer malware attacks, 40-60% will go out of business as a direct result. With these high stakes of being unprepared, planning for rapid recovery is a key management responsibility.

Multiple components affect downtime and disaster recovery. The first essential step is to have cloud backups for your critical files. Subsequently, more advanced solutions such as Dedicated Recovery Servers and Data Protection onsite and offsite are crucial for business continuity and rapid recovery. An effective recovery strategy is equally important, as it provides a blueprint for how your business operations will move forward with minimal devastation.

Businesses that invest the time and energy to organize an emergency response plan have far fewer headaches – and potentially lost revenue – if a disaster occurs. Anticipating and preparing for the worst scenario will help protect essential operations and arm leadership with concrete steps necessary to stay calm and clear-headed.

Establish an in-depth plan for how to proceed if the worst should happen and catastrophic data loss occurs. How much downtime can your business afford? Assess honestly the disruption a data disaster would have on your operation. Then put together both an IT recovery plan – and furthermore, a business continuity plan – that reflects and accounts for the risk that your organization faces with downtime. Without these blueprints, the potential is great for significant revenue loss and irreparable damage to your business.

Your plan should balance both time and expense – including specific and detailed steps that need to be taken to restore operations quickly and completely. Making sure your Recovery solutions are aligned before a disaster is key to minimizing risk. For a full discussion of this important planning, download the eBook “Align Disaster Recovery Strategies and Solutions in Five Steps”.

RenovoData again were once again featured in the leading publication from the Transport Intermediaries Association, The Logistics Journal. The article, written by our own Chuck Cook, provides expert-level detail on recent downtime scenarios that have made the news as well as looking at the possible assessments a company can take to gauge their potential downtime.

Excerpt:

Before an informed assessment of an Organization’s potential downtime costs can be made, a careful, detailed review of the company’s operations is necessary for identifying and evaluating risks and opportunities. This is a time-consuming and painstaking set of tasks, but the time and effort spent in this round of analysis is always a worthwhile investment..

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What is downtime?

Simply put, downtime is an interruption of your business. This interruption can be caused by a multitude of factors, both internal and external. How downtime affects your business is also influenced by the industry you are in, whether you are service-based, product-based, brick-and-mortar or online. So while the purpose of this blog post is to discuss the costs of downtime in general, a company would be wise to conduct its own personalized review of operations to identify risks and opportunities, so that no one is caught off guard if or when a business stops suddenly.

Let’s look at the cost of IT downtime.

Within the last few years, industry leaders have noted that the cost of IT downtime has gone up, not down, and even with the advancements in technology, the wide availability of cloud-based services, the increased efficiency of data centers, and the like. In 2014, Gartner estimated IT downtime for enterprises to cost $5,600 per minute or $300,000 per hour. Other studies place the actual cost closer to $7,900 per minute. According to CA Technologies, the cost of downtime is estimated at $55,000 per year for small businesses. For larger businesses, that cost could exceed $1 million.

How do you calculate your cost of downtime?

The first step is to make a list of the tangible technology components that have a significant impact on your company’s day-to-day operations. These may include software, applications, email platforms, e-commerce, CRMs, cloud-based applications and tools, hardware (such as servers), and more. Next, think of downtime by a single unit of measurement. How does one hour of unplanned IT downtime impact one employee? Or one client? Or one potential customer? Downtime can impact your reputation so it should never be taken lightly.

A proactive approach to the subject of downtime is undoubtedly the best strategy for any company to employ. If action is taken only after an interruption occurs, the recovery time will be longer, more stressful and more expensive than if that company had taken the time to plan ahead.  For more information about the cost of downtime for your business, please check out our free Downtime Calculator.

RenovoData is a data protection specialist that helps you align your company’s recovery and uptime goals.

We do this with a focus on balanced cost and recovery capability. We take pride in our proactive delivery of recovery and uptime assistance services. What really sets Renovo apart from our competition is our drive to be hands-on, and that means getting in the trenches when our clients need us the most.

Today, we are going to take a look at the costs to consider for using a cloud-based backup service:

• Recoverability assessment – evaluates the ability of your DR plan to meet business continuity goals
• Initial implementation – What is it going to cost to make the switch?
• Pay-per-use for capacity – measures cloud-based resource usage based on predefined parameters outlined by pricing plans

Your cloud backup service provider should have access to an ROI calculator that you can use to determine the cost savings over a multi-year period of a cloud backup and recovery solution as compared with an on-premise system. Our calculator can be found here.

Many companies will discover that the total cost of ownership for a cloud backup and recovery system is significantly lower than traditional tape-based or other on-premise methods.

Along with the total cost of ownership, there are other associated financial advantages of a cloud backup service including:

• Lower operating and administrative costs due to automated backups
• Built-in scalability which makes it easy to evolve with new business needs
• Cloud backup software that scans your data for integrity or corruption issues and alerts your company immediately, preventing costly problems in advance
• Deployment of IT resources in more strategic innovative initiatives that enable greater competitive advantages
• Simple recovery drills for peace of mind

Plus, our three-tier system of data storage vs. one-size-fits-all means that storing “old data” costs much less. Additionally, our ability to maintain up to 10,000 versions of every file makes recovery after data loss more timely and efficient. With our innovative products and passion for customer service, it’s easy to see that the financial advantages of RenovoData’s cloud backup service are well worth your consideration.

I’m here to tell you that the financial advantages of RenovoData’s cloud backup service go beyond the lower total cost of ownership. First, let’s recap some of the basics…

Traditional data storage methods, like tape backup, require significant investment in the following:

• Hardware and Software
• Ongoing maintenance for both hardware and software
• Initial setup costs for configuration
• Time and resources for managing backup and restore, including periodic recovery drills
• Future scalability and costs of additional infrastructure

By comparison, costs associated with cloud-based backup services are characterized by:

• Recoverability assessment
• Initial implementation
• Pay-per-use for capacity

Cloud-based backup and recovery services also have the advantage of working with a company’s existing infrastructure – this also reduces the cost of ownership. Along with lower total cost of ownership, there are other associated financial advantages of a cloud backup service including:

• Lower operating and administrative costs due to automated backups
• Built-in scalability which makes it easy to evolve with new business needs
• Cloud backup software that scans your data for integrity or corruption issues and alerts your company immediately, preventing costly problems in advance
• Deployment of IT resources in more strategic innovative initiatives that enable greater competitive advantages
• Simple recovery drills for peace of mind

RenovoData is a true data protection specialist that helps you align your company’s recovery and uptime goals. We do this with a focus on balanced cost and recovery capability. RenovoData takes pride in our proactive delivery of recovery and uptime assistance services. Of course, there are plenty of people out there that will sell you a piece of software and yet others that say “the data is in the vault”. However, what really sets Renovo apart is our drive to be hands-on, and that means getting in the trenches when our clients need us the most. Plus, our three-tier system of data storage means that storing “old data” costs much less—add to that, our ability to maintain up to 10,000 versions of every file, which makes recovery after data loss that much faster!

With our innovative products and passion for customer service, it’s easy to see that the financial advantages of RenovoData’s cloud backup service are truly undeniable.