Waste and Recycling challenges: Loss of data

  Chris Williams

 


Unexpected data loss is one of the issues faced by Waste and Recycling management companies. We explore how you can help prevent the issues surrounding the event of losing business critical data

The problems
  • How quickly could you recover from a catastrophic failure?
  • How will you conduct our business whilst the essential business data is unavailable?
  • Can you afford to lose any business critical data?
Why backup?

Backups are of course critical to the survival of your business. However, if you are only performing backups to a local drive, then you’re missing an essential part of your backup strategy.  Ideally, backups need to be stored externally.

External (off-site) backups will protect your business from catastrophic events such as fire, flood, theft and terminal hardware failure.

Even with a backup strategy in place, how often you backup is key to how quickly you will recover from a catastrophic failure.  The more frequently you backup, the lower the risk of potential data loss. Backups are often not considered until you need them most!  Don’t put it off till it’s too late!

Off-site storage

This is designed to ensure that your business critical data is kept off-site securely, so that in the event of a catastrophic failure, you will still have access to the backups you need. This will ensure that you can recover to a point in time. How often you backup to this off-site repository, will determine the potential data loss you might incur. This strategy certainly outweighs the local-only backups employed by many companies, and is a fairly low-cost solution to protect you against catastrophic failures.

Disaster Recovery

By implementing a ‘warm-standby’, disaster recovery environment, that restores backed up data on a regular basis (minutes), you can ensure that you recover from a system failure, quickly and with minimal loss of data (if any). This standby environment can be ready to go very quickly and could mean that your users suffer no down-time, and therefore you would suffer no detrimental effect to your business.

Software necessary for the running of your business, would already be implemented in a ‘ready-to-go’ state, so that your users can easily switch to the standby environment, often seamlessly.

How can ISB Global help?

Waste and Recycling One is a waste management software solution that standardises, integrates, simplifies, and automates all your waste and recycling processes, to create efficiencies throughout the business.

By leveraging services from ‘Amazon Web Services’, we can implement one of several strategies that will mean you can easily mitigate your risk in terms of data loss and ensure that the time taken to get your business back up and running after a catastrophic failure is kept to a as little as possible. The standby-server can be run on a minimal instance server, so keeping the costs low. In the event of a system failure of your production environment, this instance can quickly be upgraded in terms of CPU, Ram and available disk space, to ensure it has the necessary capacity to run your business.

What should you do now?

Speak to us and we can discuss with you, how our software solution can help you ensure your data remains recoverable.  We can also analyse your current strategy, to ensure it meets your business continuity requirements.

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