Data Recovery Blog

Data storage media is so often the unsung hero of the business world. Nigh-on all companies and organisations rely on it in some way shape or form. For many, it plays an invaluable role in vital departments such as sales, marketing and customer care – and this is becoming more apparent at more and more institutions each day least of all because we’ve seen just how urgent data recovery services can be needed first-hand.

In spite of this, a surprisingly large number of senior stakeholders are – whilst not unaware of the importance of their data – unprepared for the possibility of their storage media failing. This, I am in no doubt, is attributable to the fact that hard drives, SSDs etc. are extremely reliable. Earlier this week, though, GitHub – a large tech firm who really should have known better – went down for several hours because of, you guessed it, failed storage media.

Yes, on Monday GitHub was unable to provide its customers with a service for several hours. What’s more, even after it appeared that normal service had resumed, users continued to report problems relating to matters such as logging in and site speed.

Several hours is, in the era of social media, enough to cause significant damage to a company’s reputation. Numerous users took to Twitter, Facebook et al. to lambast GitHub for their failure. The damage this will cause them remains to be seen, but we think it’s safe to say that this isn’t an event that is simply going to blow over.

A timely reminder for businesses

On the plus side, we hope this event serves to remind all other companies of how important it is to have a disaster recovery plan in place. Data is key to modern business practices – losing it can therefore cause your customers serious problems. Worse yet, it can prevent you from fulfilling services or generating new sales and negatively impact your bottom line.

Thanks to significant technological improvements, backing up data is both easier – and cheaper – than ever. In their defence, most decision makers have recognised this (a recent survey revealed that most would be investing in the Cloud in 2019) but it’s astounding how many still consider backups to be superfluous and an unproductive way to spend time. This, when just a few hours spent setting up automated backups will transform this task into something that requires minimal effort and return maximum security. Perhaps most important of all is the fact that it’ll save thousands of pounds in data recovery fees.

Businesses, don’t neglect your data – back it up and formulate an effective disaster recovery plan; it’ll provide maximum security for minimum effort.