Data Backup and Recovery

There exist a myriad of potential threats to your business information. Data loss can occur (and does every day) from hardware failure, accidental or intentional deletion, ransomware, viruses, malware, and many other causes. A comprehensive data protection and backup strategy is a necessity to ensure the Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability of your organization’s data assets.

You may be thinking, “my IT person, department or company has that in good shape so no worries.” Hopefully, that is true. Given the high cost of recovery efforts and potential for lost business, it is prudent to take a closer look, including defining just what are adequate backups. When taken in the context of actually needing to restore at some point, it is a fairly complex subject. My experience has been that in nearly all cases, there is room for improvement.

Considerations

• What programs and data need to be backed up?
• How much data can your business afford to lose?
• How long can you operate “off-line” while recovering data from a loss event?

3-2-1 Backup Approach

This strategy consists of having two copies of backups on-site for quick recovery plus one off-site in case of disaster. 3-2-1 is a decent place to start. Often, businesses need more than this, and they additionally keep archived weekly, monthly, and annual backups.

Cloud Backup Considerations

The modern way to do backup is through a cloud backup provider. Such solutions are the norm. Be sure to always to take into account your network speed. Quite a few companies with a lot of backup data have discovered that it can take days, weeks, or even months to restore their data. Policies and services vary between providers. It is always best to have a cloud provider that will overnight your data on DVDs or another device to permit quick, local, restoration. A capable cloud backup provider will also have several other characteristics including distributed, redundant data centers, top-notch security, and allow restoring to a different physical system than was initially backed up.

Data in the Cloud

If you operate some portion of your business “in the cloud,” be sure to consider all of the same factors when evaluating backup and disaster recovery capabilities. Yes, it is advisable to “backup the cloud” including Microsoft 365.

Make Sure the Backups Run

Regardless of the specific solution, the effort to make sure that the backups run successfully every time is super important. Most solutions incorporate an email or other confirmation of success or failure for this purpose. Someone (and a backup person) needs to be appointed to be in charge of verifying the backups are happening successfully as a part of their job description.

Test and re-test (regularly)

As many as 70% of enterprises don’t routinely test their backup restore capabilities. Testing restoration capabilities in a recovery situation for the first time is far from ideal.

If you need assistance, Soltis Associates would be delighted to help set-up a comprehensive backup strategy along with appropriate network security to minimize potential threats to your organization’s information assets. We will establish policies and procedures customized to the needs of your organization (and test them). Our services include creation & implementation of a comprehensive backup & recovery strategy.