No matter how well-prepared your business is, mistakes and unforeseen events can still happen. From natural disasters to human error, there are many potential risks that can disrupt your business operations. That's why it's crucial to have a solid business continuity plan in place.

How often do you think about your data backup system? If you’re like most businesses, it’s something that you will likely set up, then quickly forget about, provided you haven’t had to use it. Still, having one is essential to any modern business, and building it with clear outcomes and metrics in mind will help you make your data backup system more effective for the moments when you’re glad you have it.

Losing important data can be a nightmare for any business, but what happens when an ex-employee intentionally deletes all of their data before leaving? This can be a major setback for any company, especially if the data is crucial for daily operations or compliance purposes.

In this article, we will discuss the steps you can take to prevent this situation from happening, as well as how to retrieve lost data and ensure it doesn't happen again.

The 3-2-1 rule is a pretty standard reference for data backup and disaster recovery, but what does this rule actually entail? Today, we want to explain perhaps the most important concept to prolonging the life of your business, even in the face of difficult and trying circumstances.

Regarding business data backups, we’ll commonly reference something called the 3-2-1 Backup Rule. Just in case you’ve missed our explanations of these critical best practices in the past, we felt we should go over what it is and what each of its elements accomplishes.

It’s a Tuesday morning after a long weekend. You come into the office and note that a couple employees are struggling to log into their machines. You don’t think much of it. You go to your office, set your coffee down, and try to log into your desktop. It fails. 

Your first thought is that your whole day just went sideways. That’s just the start of it.

The growth that digital storage has seen over the past several decades is immense. In that time most data has been stored on hard disk drives (HDD). Now with solid-state drives (SSD) being more affordable than ever, it’s no surprise that most computers are preferring this faster and less fragile model. Today, we wanted to highlight that fragility and try to expose some variables that help you tell if your HDD is about to fail. 

The one thing about data backup is that it seems like it is pretty simple: You have data, you copy it and store it should something happen to your original. Sure, that’s the basic makeup of a data backup, but if you want a backup you can really rely on, you need it to be faultless. Enter Backup and Disaster Recovery. 

Ransomware is a serious issue for businesses. How serious?

Think “$265 billion in costs by 2031” serious. In light of this, every organization needs to do everything possible to avoid falling victim to ransomware. Let’s touch on a few practices that will help.

Friday, March 31, 2023, is World Backup Day, the annual observance set aside to help ensure that businesses and individual users alike are doing what they need to do to protect their data from loss. Let’s go over where this observance came from, why it is so important for your business, and how you can make sure your organization is as protected as possible. 

We are of the firm belief that data backup is crucial to the continued success of any business. It can be the differentiating factor for a business that is successful and one that less unfortunate circumstances knock them off the grid for good. You can invest in your business’ future with a solid data backup solution, even if it’s there simply as a preventative measure.

According to the weather forecast, we Marylanders are in for a winter that is unreasonably cold and unreasonably snowy. Based on our experience, that’s the exact recipe for weather-induced business disasters. We strongly, strongly recommend that you ensure that you have your business continuity plans in order.

If your business isn’t satisfied with your current computer guy, and still dealing with slow PCs, crashes, and other issues, it’s time to start shopping around for an IT consultant you can trust. 

If you are a business owner in Bel Air, check out these tips for questions to ask your next potential IT person.

How seriously does your business take data backup and disaster recovery? You might not be able to predict the future or what might occur, but you can at least prepare for it to mitigate the damage it could potentially bring about. Today, we want to share some of the best practices you can implement to combat even the worst disaster scenarios your organization might encounter.

Look, nobody likes picturing the worst-case scenario that could befall their business—even doing so might feel a bit like memorizing a divorce attorney's number as you write your wedding vows. However, failing to have some strategy in place could very well lead to your business’ downfall. What does it take to properly plan and prepare for the possibility of a disaster, and the associated recovery you’ll have to undergo?

We are consistently adamant that businesses have a comprehensive data backup strategy to help secure its operational continuity. The threat environment in which we find ourselves at the present time only reinforces the importance of such a backup strategy. This month we thought we’d take a few minutes to review what makes a business’ backup platform comprehensive. 

Data, at least nowadays, effectively makes the world go ‘round. Data is responsible for powering the operations that a business needs to undergo if it is to survive. This—as you may imagine—makes data incredibly important for businesses of all sizes to protect.

Novelty holidays have been all the rage for the past couple years. The thing is that if you are going to celebrate World Kimchi Day on November 22 or its sister holiday, World Cabbage Day on February 17, you either really like cabbage, or you really like holidays. With so many people using technology as a major part of their life and business, it’s no surprise that it is well represented on the holiday calendar. You have a few we’ve already missed: National Technology Day on January 6, Data Privacy Day on January 28, and National Clean Out Your Computer Day on February 8, but there are three important IT “holidays” this month. Let’s take a look at them now.

With a business’ data being such a priority nowadays, protecting it against all circumstances needs to be appropriately attended to. One fundamental component of this protection is the implementation of a proper backup strategy. Let’s go over the most foundational element of a successful backup, and how we recommend businesses to accomplish it: redundancy.

In business, the more time your operations stutter, the more it costs. If downtime is extended, it can cause some serious problems for your business. This is true from the one-man band to the largest enterprise. This month we thought we would outline a couple ways that downtime can have a negative effect on your business aside from the obvious.