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Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are currently facing tighter IT budgets and mounting cyber-security threats, all while managing ever-larger volumes of data, which is why Unitrends is offering SMBs a free online disaster recovery tool.
The physical, virtual and cloud-based protection and recovery specialist announced the launch of BC/DR Link, an online service designed to help midmarket companies worldwide build a comprehensive disaster recovery plan.
“A lot of companies hear disaster recovery and immediately think of natural disasters such as floods or fires, which can lead to a ‘that will never happen to me’ mentality,” Mark Campbell, Unitrends’ chief strategy and technology officer, told eWEEK. “But actually, there are far more common causes of downtime and data loss that SMBs should be concerned about, including hardware failure, software corruption, human error and malware attacks.”
The platform provides users with step-by-step instructions for building a disaster recovery plan based on industry standards and best practices.
In addition, the service includes 1 Gigabyte of centralized storage in the Unitrends cloud, which companies can use to house disaster recovery and business continuity documents, such as evacuation plans and emergency contacts.
“Limited budget and resources are the two most common reasons why SMBs fail to implement a disaster recovery strategy despite understanding its importance,” Campbell said. “Our focus at Unitrends is to provide all customers with 100 percent disaster recovery assurance, and BC/DR Link is the latest demonstration of this commitment.”
In the event of a disaster or outage, IT leaders at the affected company can give everyone disaster recovery (DR) instructions remotely so they can swing back into coordinated action.
The tool also allows IT to link the business together with mobile checklists, securely linking key people to the DR plan from a smartphone or other mobile device.
“Any sort of small business that uses technology is at risk of data loss—that’s almost everyone. Thinking that downtime or data loss won’t happen to you is a grave mistake,” Campbell said. “Companies need to prepare for the worst with a best practices plan that will facilitate reliable and rapid recovery. With a free tool, there’s no longer an excuse to let disaster recovery planning fall to the wayside.”
The company also offers a disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) offering, an automated business continuity solution that guarantees full recovery of entire IT infrastructures in the cloud within hours of a declared disaster.
The platform leverages the company’s ReliableDR, Enterprise Backup and Bridge technologies, which enable customers to spin up VMware virtual machines and provide complete disaster recovery testing, governance and compliance.
In the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Small Business Continuity Planning Integrated report, more than 60 percent of American small businesses do not have a formal emergency-response plan and do not back up their data off-site.
Statistics show that 25 percent of businesses do not reopen after a natural disaster and 43 percent do not reopen after catastrophic data loss. More staggering is that 75 percent of businesses fail within three years of a natural disaster that do not have business continuity plans.