Today’s small to mid-sized businesses, or SMBs, are creating more data than ever. Their growth calls for more powerful solutions to back up their business-critical data.

Your IT Resources need to be managed effectively, so it is crucial to know exactly what to look for in a backup solution. Successful backup is the foundation for disaster recovery and business continuity. Without it, recovery and continuity cannot exist.  Technologies that were created decades ago to store data are simply not enough. Antiquated methods, like tape backup, aren’t going to ensure data retention and recovery during business-critical time windows. Basic file/folder backup to the cloud isn’t adequate.

So, when choosing a backup solution, you should look for four criteria when picking and deploying a system: ease of use, performance and reliability, scalability and recoverability.

• Ease of Use: As your employees tend to take on multiple roles at work, managing IT shouldn’t be one of them. Solutions that offer intelligent user interfaces and are also supported by a vast network of managed service providers are often the best choices.
• Performance and Reliability: It makes sense that quicker and more frequent backups limit data loss. So when choosing a reliable solution, you should choose one that performs snapshots often. An ideal solution is incremental backup, where the technology adds what you’ve changed or deleted, rather than backing up the entire volume of data repeatedly. This adds to a solution’s ability to perform more quickly.
• Scalability: Successful small businesses often grow into larger businesses. With that comes the creation of more and more data. Alongside this growth is a need for more advanced backup and business continuity solutions. Selecting a provider who works with businesses of all sizes, promises you a bigger selection of products and services to meet their needs as they evolve.
• Recoverability: Small businesses generally do not have a dedicated IT department that can manage separate backup, recovery and business continuity solutions. Does the solution provide key functionality that is seamlessly integrated? A combination of on-premises and cloud-based services offer the best total protection for businesses of all sizes, especially small businesses. Having a Provider setup monitoring and alerting can keep you from disaster if a backup is missed. A Managed Service Provider can also go further and repair the problem keeping your data secure up to the minute. 

When selecting your backup and business continuity solution keep in mind the key elements you want to look for. Highly reliable solutions will yield full backups in a smarter, storage-saving way, limit downtime, and offer strong functionality at all levels. It’s also important to keep in mind your company’s long-term goals. If you are growing at a healthy pace, search for a provider that can grow with you while catering to your budget. Remember, finding the best backup and business continuity provider for your business is the first step to safeguarding your critical business data.