In this day and age, backing up your data is crucial to a smooth functioning of your company, be it a small, medium or large sized business. A loss of data can result in a significant loss of revenue for your company. In addition, data loss can cause downtime or an interruption of computing services. The solution to both of these problems is a simple one — back up your data online in the cloud.
Medical informatics, nuclear power stations, banks and other financial institutions, aeronautics/airlines, news and journalism; e-commerce and transaction processing or even online games industries would immediately feel the pressure of downtime or loss of data. A minor downtime and a loss of data in these industries could prove to be disastrous, as existing customers experience frustrations and may consider cancelling their services altogether; and would-be-customers could end up avoiding this particular service, resulting in loss of revenues.
Many contract defaults could be attributed to system downtime or loss of data, resulting in litigation and financial losses. These industries need to ensure high availability, reliability and alternate data access routes to safeguard against business losses, resulting from unplanned downtime, which is the time when computing services are unavailable for business operations.
Cloud backup service providers ensure that your data is safeguarded in the Cloud. Your data is in no danger of being lost. In addition, online backup service providers are a safeguard against downtime and ensure that your company will continue to operate regardless of hardware or software glitches, a natural calamity or just a power outage. System outages can have a serious impact on industries that access their computers 24 x 7 x 365. Others may be sensitive to the time of the outage. Peak hour outages can cripple business and have long-term repercussions on the business.
Online backup service provides offer service level agreements for their customers that spell out the guaranteed service uptime percentage value that they expect over the period of a month, typically five-nines, i.e. — 99.999%. Zero percent downtime indicates that the backup service provider has made arrangements to ensure that the customer has no system outages and the access to the server is made available at all times. Customers will, therefore, have to guard only against outages that may occur at their end of the network, giving them peace of mind.
In Part II, we will discuss further points on avoiding downtime.
