Why Accounting Firms Need a BDR Solution

Author: Craig Pollack Date: Apr 24, 2018 Topics: _CPA and Accountant Blogs

As a certified public accountant (CPA), you’re entrusted to protect the sensitive and valuable information of your clients. You can implement an intrusion detection system (IDS), use a firewall, and anti-malware and antivirus software — all of which steps are highly recommended as part of a layered approach to cybersecurity. However, you also need to establish a backup & disaster recovery (BDR) solution for your business as well. Why? I’ll tell you.

Place yourself in the shoes of one of our clients whose story we shared last year. FPA, in combination with their backup & disaster recovery (BDR) solution, came to the rescue of their business when their server crashed one night after hours. All of their information was wiped out as a result of the hardware failure. Thankfully, as their managed IT security services provider, we’d already made a complete image of their 200GB information store of their Exchange Server and were able to get it back up and running on the BDR server the next day.  

Data backup and a disaster recovery plan fit together like peanut butter and jelly. The data backup copies or replicates your data from one device to another, whereas a DR plan is that process on steroids — it’s about getting your business back to running at 100% after being knocked back to square one from a cyber attack or another disaster. This means that a reliable BDR plan helps to save businesses from:

  • Unplanned business interruptions,
  • Loss of productivity, and
  • Reduced cash flow.

Ask yourself: If this happened to your accounting firm, would you be prepared? Do you have a BDR solution in place to protect your accounting technology? If you don’t, I’ve put together a list of the reasons why accounting firms need to get an effective BDR solution in place now.

BDR is a Critical Part of Your Business Continuity Plan

Some small and medium-sized business (SMBs) leaders are too focused on what is happening now with their business, meaning that they may not consider ways to prevent what could happen to their business in the future. For others, they may think that an investment in one of these solutions is too costly, not considering the cost of not investing in this kind of insurance — losing all of their data that could have otherwise been saved.

This is particularly disturbing considering that surveys show that 40% of organizations don’t have any kind of documented disaster recovery plan in place — and another 40% of companies that do have a plan in place only bother to test it once a year.

Unfortunately, these decisions demonstrate how easy it can be for busy organizations to allow the task of creating a business continuity plan (BCP) to simply fall by the wayside until it’s too late. Thankfully, you have FPA IT security services experts on your side to ensure that doesn’t happen to your business. We’re here to ensure that our clients are properly informed about all of the options, costs, and risks associated with implementing a BCP and will help you develop one.

Our fast, reliable, and cost-effective BDR solution provides:

  • Cost-effective online storage in the cloud;
  • Secure online storage at redundant locations around the United States;
  • Rapid recovery data backup with infinite restore points;
  • A 256-bit military-grade AES algorithm encryption of your backup files;
  • Timely fail-over to virtual servers (within an hour); and
  • Full server restores to and from virtual environments to bare metal and/or dissimilar hardware systems.

BDR Helps to Get Your Business Up & Running After an Inevitable Attack

As an experienced IT professional in the Los Angeles area for more than 25 years, the cavalier attitude demonstrated by these companies’ leaders toward implementing a backup & disaster recovery solution alarms me. The reason is because I know that it’s virtually impossible to prevent 100% of all cyber attacks. And, if you’re not regularly updating your DR plan and performing semi-annual failover testing to ensure your data backups are operational, then your efforts will be meaningless.

A comprehensive BDR solution helps businesses minimize any potential downtime that results from any natural or manmade disaster. This means that your business will be able to restore downed servers in as little as an hour, depending on the size of your backups.

Be sure to check out my list of eight tips that LA CPAs need for effective disaster recovery planning.

Bottom Line

Protecting your data is your top priority as a trusted Los Angeles CPA. A critical step in doing so is choosing the right backup and storage method and provider that will meet the needs of your accounting firm. This would be a solution that not only helps to keep your firm from permanently losing data but also helps to get your accounting firm back online as quickly as possible.

Once again I’ll ask: Does your firm have a basic disaster recovery plan? If so, what are the key elements of your plan? Let me know your thoughts in the comments box below. Or, you can always reach out to me directly to continue this discussion more in-depth.

CPAs & Accountants Resource Center

Author

Craig Pollack

Craig Pollack

Craig is the Founder & CEO of FPA Technology Services, Inc. Craig provides the strategy and direction for FPA, ensuring its clients, business owners, and key decision makers leverage technology as efficiently and effectively as possible. With over 30 years of experience building the preeminent IT Service Provider in the Southern California area, Craig is one of the area’s leading authorities on how small to mid-sized businesses can best leverage and secure their technology to achieve their business objectives.

Comments