A business continuity and disaster recovery solution is one of the most important safeguards for your retail or restaurant enterprise. With careful planning, retailers and restaurateurs can ensure they have robust backup and recovery plans in place to ride out the unforeseeable, whether that’s a catastrophic storm like Hurricane Katrina or Superstorm Sandy, or a freak accident, such as a car crash wiping out the power lines that supply electricity to your facilities.
Over the past decade, many businesses have turned to the cloud for smart and secure backup. By leveraging the cloud to replicate and store their data, retailers and restaurateurs can ensure they can continue operating with minimized fallout, no matter what may come.
Confidence in the Cloud
Did you know that data from 2015 shows that one hour of downtime costs a small business $8,000? It’s even a higher number for larger businesses: $74,000 for a mid-sized company and as much as $800,000 for a large enterprise. With so much at stake, it’s no wonder smart business owners are taking steps to safeguard one of their most valuable assets: data.
It’s important to point out that backup and recovery options in the cloud exist whether your business hosts its critical data on your business’ premises or leverages the cloud for POS and other data storage. While it may seem redundant to use the cloud for back up or to use a hybrid solution that combines on-premises backup with off-site cloud backup, that’s essentially the point: no matter how robust a cloud network may be, it’s just good sense to ensure continuity in the event that your POS is hindered in some way. To access your data in the cloud, all you need is an Internet connection. This means that whether you’re on the go with a smart device or tethered to your PC, as long as you’re online, your business data replicated in the cloud is just a click away.
Why to Replicate in the Cloud
When you replicate your data in the cloud, you can decide how you want to configure the backup. Some retailers want to back up frequently, pushing data to the cloud every hour to minimize the amount of data that would have to be re-entered into systems since the last backup before an outage.
What’s more, choosing a backup and recovery plan via replication in the cloud should allow for your POS to continue running if you lose your internet connection. Look for a POS system that holds all data in all of the terminals — not a “master/slave” model. This ensures data is stored redundantly at every level, communicating hundreds of times each minute to ensure everything is up to date across the network. With a POS system such as this, your business isn’t dependent on an internet connection. You can continue to operate if the connection is interrupted. And once you’re back online, your system will automatically begin backing up again, ensuring that the data accumulated in the POS while you were offline is once again replicated in the cloud.
Set Your Objectives
Every retailer has to decide how long applications and platforms can be down before the impact is really felt across the business. Prioritize which applications are the most critical; this will inform your backup and recovery options. You want to find a cost-effective system that will keep all of your data.
Setting a backup and recovery plan leveraging replication in the cloud makes good business sense and can protect retailers against significant financial damage when things go awry. Turn to the cloud for an option that’s affordable, scalable and above all, reliable.
