The last two years have been tough for all of us.  As the economy entered a dismal downspin of epic proportions, corporate America performed magic to keep their heads above water.  Senior management has been forced to work smarter and leaner and has exhausted belt tightening tricks to maintain the bottom line.  Those money saving measures have included reducing headcount and taking a scalpel to all departments.  Working lean and mean is the new norm.

In this new era of corporate conservatism, I am urging you, in fact begging you, to upsize your backup in your downsized world.  Backup is the disciplined process of protecting your mission critical data on a daily or continual basis and securing it in a remote site.  Your business survival and prosperity depends on mission critical data and the loss of that data could bring financial harm to you, your company and your customers. 

I would like to share EIGHT REASONS you really need to enhance your backup now:

1.      Your staff is smaller today and you may have laid off the guy who does the backup.  If you didn’t, he is probably too busy to do this every single day without fail.

2.     You riffed Henry after twelve years in the accounting department.  If Henry took it hard he may have deleted accounts receivables as you escorted him out the door.

3.     You fired your tape courier (just too expensive) and now Madeline takes the tape home.  A really bad idea and unfair to Madeline.

4.     You cancelled the maintenance contract on the tape drives to save money and they are unreliable.

5.     You keep the tapes beyond their useful life.  Of course you don’t know that they failed until you try to restore data…WHOOPS.

6.     Morale suffers when people are overworked and the staff gets careless.

7.     Recovery tests that are supposed to be performed twice per year don’t get done at all.  There just isn’t time anymore.   

8.     We become firefighters instead of fire preventers and important things like backup fall through the cracks.

I am not trying to frighten you (well maybe just a little) but stuff happens and data loss or destruction can have a devastating and lasting impact on your business. 

BUT THERE IS GOOD NEWS.  The cost of online data backup has decreased by over 50% in the past three years.  Storage and bandwidth costs have been the major drivers of this reduction but technology and the emergence of the cloud have contributed in a major way as well to this new affordability.  In fact, in companies with multiple servers in different locations, online backup costs less than traditional tape backup and offsite storage.

But this is not about money, it is about survival.  Effective, secure, disciplined data backup is not a luxury it is an absolute necessity.  You and many others in your business have worked very hard over many years to build a great company that brings value to its customers and clients.  Make sure that value doesn’t disappear in the middle of the night.