If you think you can afford downtime, ask the small-business owners who faced Hurricane Isaac in the U.S. Southeast. Many of them had to close their doors as the Category 1 hurricane left more t

September 12, 2012

2 Min Read
3 Things SMBs Must Do Before the Next Natural Disaster

By Axcient Guest Blog 2

hurricane

If you think you can afford downtime, ask the small-business owners who faced Hurricane Isaac in the U.S. Southeast. Many of them had to close their doors as the Category 1 hurricane left more than 900,000 people and businesses without power for more than a week across Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. Last year, natural disasters caused nearly $24 million in damages in the U.S. alone, according to a 2011 report by the National Weather Service.

Even though Hurricane Isaac has now passed, many of your customers are rethinking their business’s disaster recovery plan, and it’s a good time to help them through the process. Here are three things IT resellers should address with their small and midsized business customers to help them prepare for any emergency:

  1. Ensure backups are complete. Make sure any alerts or incomplete backups are addressed daily to validate that your customers’ data protection systems are in good health. You want to see all files and folders backed up for all servers, workstations and systems across multiple platforms, using a solution with reverse incremental and transactional backup technology to avoid data corruption and ensure fast restorability.

  2. Check your offsites. Verify that all backups are uploaded to the cloud, and make sure your disaster recovery solution has the most reliable recovery capabilities and the most secure datacenters.

  3. Review your business continuity plan. If your customers’ systems are damaged, how will you get their business back up and running? Your customers can’t afford revenue loss or downtime, so they need a business continuity system that allows them to virtualize their systems, data and applications in the cloud. Axcient allows you to do instant cloud failover from a home office or any other Internet-enabled location (even Starbucks!) so you don’t lose business productivity.

The U.S. Small Business Administration reports that there are more than 27 million small businesses in the United States. Only half of them have a natural disaster business continuity plan, according to CNBC. This makes it easy to see why only 69 percent of them survive at least two years (source: Small Business Media). Don’t let your SMB customers become a casualty of downtime. Make sure they’re protected with a solution that will not just restore their data, but keep their business running.

The Axcient unified cloud platform enables businesses to store, protect and access all their information and systems anytime, anywhere. Plus, now NetEnrich will monitor and manage the Axcient solution for resellers and their customers.

Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of The VAR Guy’s annual platinum sponsorship. Read all of Axient’s guest blogs here.

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