This article is adapted from our data backup partner.
Small businesses are often forgotten when people talk about companies being more resilient. That’s a big mistake. While big businesses likely have the resources to recover from a disaster, for small businesses that’s often not the case. In fact, according to FEMA, 40 percent of small businesses never reopen after a disaster, and 90% fail if they don’t reopen quickly enough. Even if a small business does survive a disaster, the costs can be staggering. That’s where resilience comes into play.
Business resilience essentially spans crisis management and business continuity and is defined as the ability of an organization to quickly adapt and respond to all kinds of risks—cyberattacks, ransomware, natural disasters, hardware failures, and so on. In this post, we’ll focus on resilience as it relates to the cloud and business continuity. Here are a few key areas where the cloud can make your small business more resilient:
#1: Anywhere, Anytime Availability
Say disaster does strike and your data center (or data closet, as the case may be) isn’t accessible? If you move your communication platforms and productivity apps to the cloud they are always available, wherever you have an internet connection. And unexpected events like the sudden shift to remote work due to the pandemic won’t slow your business down. Your people can continue to work, seamlessly, wherever they are.
#2: Data Protection
Making sure your data is protected starts by regularly backing it up. Using the cloud for backups is your best option thanks to the high level of security and availability they provide. For smaller companies, some data backup products are built for simpler environments—and perfect for remote and branch offices. They can help stream your data directly to the Cloud, so you can count on it being available if disaster strikes. That helps ensure business continuity and increased resilience. And, going back to anywhere, anytime availability, some products also gives you cloud-based access from any browser, with set-and-forget management that doesn’t require dedicated staffing or expensive resources.
#3: Backup and Disaster Recovery
Because data backup solutions are usually fully integrated with cloud services, your data is backed up to its distributed, scalable, and fault-tolerant disaster recovery cloud. So you can count on 99.999+ percent uptime. And, if disaster does strike, you can recover with one click. Some even offer everything from file and folder recovery and machine virtualization to nearly instant failover of an entire network.