If you’re reading this blog today, chances are good that you are in the early stages of exploring off-site data. Or you’re looking to build the business case to make the move. This obviously represents a major organizational shift and a substantial investment. However, it should be just that. An investment. Not an expense. When you analyze data center specifications and costs there should be no question that this will make you money. To make sure you see a return-on-investment when moving data off-site, here are 4 situations that demand a move to off-site data.
1. A Security Incident
Maybe you experienced your own data breach, or maybe someone else in your industry experienced one and it has you wondering how safe you actually are. You really do want to stay ahead of this, as data attacks are getting more sophisticated and more prevalent. For big businesses, a data breach can cost an average of 8 million dollars. Or if you’re a small-to-medium sized business you have a 60 percent chance of declaring bankruptcy after a data breach.
2. You’re Dealing With Bigger Clients
If your business recently landed a major client or government agency, they might have new requirements for the protection of their data. So, it’s time for you to upgrade. Or maybe you are shifting your focus to go after bigger fish. Do you want to upgrade your data security and facilities now, so you can brag about them in RFPs and sales pitches in the future?
3. Your Business is Growing
You can only scale your business up until a certain point with on-site data. Eventually, it’s going to hold you back. You may already be feeling or anticipating the need to move off-site if your client list is growing in the way that we just mentioned above. Or, maybe now you have a much larger staff, which may be distributed at different offices or even different parts of the country. If this is the case, moving your data off-site should make day-to-day operations considerably easier.
4. Downtime is Hurting You More
It’s also entirely possible that the cost of downtime is really starting to impact your bottom line. It often just takes one major incident or outage to get the attention of C-level executives at a company. This makes the business case for moving your data off-site an easier pitch because nobody wants to see this happen again. Nobody wants to see their clients’ information inaccessible, or their staff brought to a productivity halt. These are only a few situations where the decision to move your data to an off-site facility should be nearly automatic. This is obviously a major decision and not one to be rushed into. However, if any of the above scenarios resonated with you, we highly doubt that it will be a decision that you regret.
