Buying backup and disaster recovery software sometime feels like buying health insurance. It feels like an unnecessary purchase, and nobody’s ever happy about paying monthly fees. But, just like insurance, everybody neglects backup and disaster recovery or considers it an unnecessary expense …that is until they actually need it.
And, let’s face it: most people think “This will NEVER happen to me!”. Unfortunately the odds are stacked against you.
Consider these fairly shocking statistics about disaster recovery and business continuity:
- Approximately half of all businesses experience some type of disaster bad enough to halt their business operations.
- Some outages last only a few hours, but over 80 percent lasted longer than a day!
- Even having downtime for just an hour can be costly: for a small company, the cost of an hour of downtime is $8,000. For large enterprises? A whopping $700,000….per hour!
Simply stated, you can’t afford to NOT have reliable backup and disaster recovery solutions.
Many companies however, especially small businesses, willfully object to and refuse to have these solutions on hand. As a trusted managed IT services provider, we have seen time and again the effects this oversite can have on a business.
Here are the three most common objections to having backup and disaster recovery, and why you still need it.
Price
Here’s the thing: truly robust backup and disaster recovery software is not cheap. There is a reluctance to pay up for this high-end software, coupled with a feeling of invulnerability (“This could never happen to me!”), lead to a BDR solution hitting the bottom of the priority pile, or not even making the list. While this objection can be true, there are a number of new BDR products on the market that come in at a reasonable price point, and given the even higher costs of lost productivity and sales that hits a business if and when disaster strikes, it is important to know understand the true cost and risk of not doing anything.
Another objection is that there are a number several lost-cost or even free BDR options available. And it’s true; there are file-and-folder backup solutions that will sync your files for a small cost per month. Compared to the truly robust BDR solutions that cost $400 or more per month, it’s easy to see why many customer opt for that cheap option. Unfortunately there is a vast difference between these less expensive options and full-blown BDR. These lower cost options don’t provide image-based backup, don’t backup mail servers and aren’t nearly as quick in their restoration. Considering that the vast majority of data loss is caused by hardware failure (and not natural disasters, as is commonly misperceived), these cheap options do a fine enough job plugging one hole in the dam…but won’t be much help when there are multiple holes to plug.
Time-Consuming Management
Many of the traditional BDR solutions on the market are time-consuming to manage. They require an IT technician to check backups and set up both virtualization and backup-and-recovery testing. They also sometimes need staff to rotate the tapes or disks to meet backup retention policies, as well as manage these going offsite to protect about total site disasters. The truth is that for many BDR solutions, there will be a lot of remedial tasks – dry, boring administrative tasks – that are required for both setup and ongoing maintenance.
Fortunately, a fully-managed backup and disaster recovery platform, one backed by a full team of certified network operations center (NOC) technicians, eliminates the need for all that painstaking day-to-day management.
A Perceived Lack of Need
Finally, most businesses simply don’t think they need BDR solutions. In their minds, BDR is nothing more than a “better mousetrap”, an unnecessary luxury item.
To handle this objection, you can use both positive and negative anecdotes.
We can of course provide a number of scary stories about businesses who have opted to not adopt a BDR solution and best practices and had a disaster inevitably strike with the downtime and data loss so significant that the business eventually went out of business.
We can also provide a number of positive stories about business that have been able to avert significant disaster because of their strong BDR solutions and their documented disaster recovery plans, allowing them to quickly bounce back.
If backup and disaster recovery isn’t on your shortlist of must-own solutions…it should be.
If you no longer believe that that price, day-to-day management or a perceived lack of need are your key objections to buying a BDR solution, contact us today to discuss your business needs.
