There are many lessons that both business owners and the government can take away from the bevy of recent natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis and most recently, Hurricane Sandy, which devastated the East Coast of the United States and flooded data centers up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Sufficiently preparing for a data disaster, be it a security breach or loss of data during a natural catastrophe, can save businesses precious time and resources.
The National Archives & Records Administration estimates that 93 percent of companies that lost access to their business critical applications for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster; and that 50 percent of such businesses threw in the towel and filed for bankruptcy immediately. The same agency estimates that 60 percent of companies that suffer catastrophic data loss will shut down within 6 months of the disaster. When it comes to accessing data and applications, time is money for companies, and a loss of systems and data for more than a day or two can impact whether or not a business remains viable.
Regardless of the type of business you run, if you depend on information such as financial statements, customer activity and order history, or confidential paperwork about your everyday business operations, such “digital assets” represent much of value behind your company. If you lose access or, worse yet, suffer permanent loss of such assets it can be detrimental to the success and recovery of your company following a disaster.
Across all industries, hardware vendors are working to make storage much more cost effective. As the price per gigabyte for hard disk drive (HDD) space decreases, there is no longer an excuse for any company to leave their data at risk.
Businesses no longer need to depend on human intervention and “sneaker net” of back-up tapes to perform data protection activities. Storage management and backup practices have become much more automated, saving IT managers’ time and resources. Disk replication and remote backup services using disk drives have become more cost-effective for maintaining disaster recovery data sets, proving to data center and IT managers alike that HDDs are the most economical and reliable storage option for businesses.
In today’s world, so much of the daily operations of a company are computer-based. The ever-increasing amount of data we are consuming and creating tells us that we’re more reliant than ever on storage devices. For these reasons, it’s imperative that companies ensure their data will be safe in the event of a disaster. As a storage device vendor, we strive to deliver efficient, cost-effective and energy-conserving enterprise HDD products, knowing that businesses of every size depend on such storage to keep their data is protected from potential harm and available to keep their business up and running.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc.