What we all need is an easier life. Less to worry about. Stuff that doesn’t go wrong – or at least if it does go wrong, then it’s pretty much painless and quick to get it back up and running again.
For small businesses and for individuals, what’s needed is an approach to resilience that doesn’t take much effort to maintain and won’t break the bank. Resilience that’s an appropriate response to the value of the risk.
Appropriate response? What I mean by that is simply valuing your data. If your data is of relatively low value then you should be happy to spend less to underwrite it. Equally, if your entire livelihood (your house, your wives, mistresses, children and animals) and the job security of your employees depends on it… well, you probably need to be spending a bit more.
So what you need to do is ask yourself this: “If I’d actually lost all my data, how much money would I be prepared to spend to get it back?”
Whatever the answer you come up with, there are resilience measures to fit that budget: From zero upwards. If the data has no value then don’t do anything about it. At the other end of the scale, there’s no upper limit.
Almost all of us fall somewhere in-between of course, and this is where your budget needs to be spent wisely. You can start very cheaply, for example, with a ‘cake’ of CDs from the supermarket, then progress through external hard drives, synchronising with online ‘cloud’ services, setting up a server with RAID drives, off-site backups, hosted services… and so on. If you’re really serious then you could get your data hosted in a James Bond style bunker like Wikileaks have done in Stockholm. The ultimate solution perhaps?
Back in the real world for a moment, it’s worth mentioning that unless you automate the backup regime then you will have to do it manually according to a schedule – and you have to stick to it. Write yourself a recurring reminder in whatever calendar you use – and don’t just snooze it; remember that Sod’s law is waiting in the wings.
If you need help to value your data, or advice on scheduling, or spending your resilience budget wisely, drop us an email through the contact us page.