The cloud has been a major game-changer for business technology, but perhaps its most important contribution has been to the backup and disaster recovery process. Businesses no longer have to suffer due to unforeseen circumstances such as hardware failure or hacking attacks. Instead, a cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solution, also known as BDR, can provide a considerable failsafe for your organization.

It should come as no surprise that the practice of business continuity planning is one that every business needs to undergo. This planning serves as essentially your only insurance against some form of data disaster or another. Consider your own business for a moment--could it survive a fire, a critical failure in part of your infrastructure, or theft? With a business continuity plan, there’s a chance it just might.

Whether you are suspicious or not, today seems like a good day to talk out what can happen if some bad luck interferes with your business. Disasters can come in all shapes and sizes, from a freak storm destroying your place of business and every IT component you had inside, to an employee whose path was crossed by a black cat accidentally spilling their coffee on their keyboard as they access some key data.

Today most companies utilize computers in the dissemination of their services. Whether you run an office that deploys dozens of computers and multiple servers, a busy restaurant with a full-scale point of sale system, or a contractor that only needs one computer with invoicing software, you depend on your data. Since most businesses also provide goods and services for many people that indirectly depend on it, having a plan to protect the business from potential devastation is important.

When we talk about best practices, we are typically referring to the practices used by successful companies to garner the best results. A new study by Disaster Recovery has shown that, as backup and recovery solutions go, enterprises are providing some pretty disappointing results as many fail to continuously back up their data and it results in additional inherent risk.