Introduction: Safeguarding Business Continuity
For accounting firms and businesses relying on Sage 50, 100, or 300, protecting critical financial data is essential. Downtime caused by server failures, cyberattacks, or natural disasters can disrupt operations, leading to lost revenue and damaged client trust. Moving from on-premise infrastructure to cloud hosting provides an immediate improvement in performance, security, and availability—but even cloud-hosted solutions need robust disaster recovery (DR) plans to ensure business continuity.
This article explores the differences between backup and disaster recovery, why effective remote backups are essential, and how Concero’s disaster recovery solutions give businesses peace of mind.
Backup vs. Disaster Recovery: Key Differences
- Backup Basics
Backups involve creating copies of data at scheduled intervals to protect against accidental loss or corruption. For example, local backups store copies on-site (such as external hard drives or office servers), but these backups are vulnerable to physical theft, fire, or hardware failure. - What is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery goes beyond data backups—it ensures that your entire environment, including users, applications, and configurations, can be restored in case of a major system failure. A proper DR plan involves replicating the entire infrastructure, including software and data, so your business can recover quickly with minimal downtime.
Local vs. Remote Backups: What’s the Difference?
While cloud hosting reduces IT overhead, businesses need to understand that not all backup procedures are equal. Many hosting providers offer local backups—where data is copied to servers within the same data center—but this approach leaves the system vulnerable to localized failures, such as power outages or natural disasters.
The Role of Remote Backups
Remote backups—also known as geo-redundant backups—store data in different geographic locations, ensuring that even if one data center fails, data can be recovered from another location. For example, Concero’s private clouds are located in Mississauga, ON, and Kelowna, BC. Customers who subscribe to the remote backup option enjoy a full replica of their environment in a secondary data center, ensuring that Sage, Cloud Desktops, and all associated data can be restored without delay in case of a disaster.
Why a Disaster Recovery Plan is Essential
Simply moving Sage to a cloud-hosted environment improves security and performance, but businesses still need a complete disaster recovery strategy. While local backups protect against small-scale data loss, businesses need remote backups and a DR plan to be fully prepared for large-scale failures, such as:
- Natural Disasters: Floods, earthquakes, and fires can affect entire data centers.
- Cyberattacks: Ransomware attacks can lock both on-premise and cloud environments, making backups essential.
- Power Outages and Hardware Failures: Even the best-maintained servers can fail unexpectedly, requiring a failover to a remote backup.
A comprehensive DR plan ensures your team can quickly restore operations, reducing downtime and maintaining service continuity for clients.
How Concero Helps Ensure Business Continuity with Remote Backups
Concero offers customers the option to store remote backups in a second, geographically diverse data center, ensuring complete redundancy. This means that if one private cloud experiences a failure, your Sage environment, applications, and data can be fully restored from the backup site.
Additionally, automated backups and retention policies ensure that data is always current and recoverable. With Concero’s Citrix-powered Cloud Desktop, businesses gain secure access from any device, even during disruptions, ensuring teams stay productive.
The Cost-Effective Value of Remote Backups
While cloud hosting already provides significant security and IT management improvements over on-prem setups, adding remote backups is an affordable way to further enhance business continuity. Businesses can minimize the risk of catastrophic data loss without investing heavily in infrastructure, making DR solutions accessible even to small and medium-sized firms.
Go Cloud with Concero
Whether you’re looking to improve performance, security, or business continuity, hosting Sage in the cloud offers immediate benefits. With remote backup options and a robust disaster recovery plan, Concero ensures that your business is protected from any disruption—allowing you to focus on what matters most.
Get a free trial of Concero Cloud Desktop today and see how remote backups and disaster recovery options give you peace of mind.
