Data Backup and Disaster Recovery
What would happen to your business if…
- A company laptop was stolen from an employee’s car or at an airport?
- Your customer data or accounting files got corrupted and were not recoverable?
- An employee checked their personal email at work and innocently clicked on a link that encrypted your entire network and demanded a ransom?
Minor misfortunes happen every day in businesses. Files become corrupt. Hard drives fail. Employees accidentally delete folders and may be fooled into clicking on vicious emails.
Major disasters also occur. Fires wipe out computers and all the data on them. Ransomware attacks turn crucial business files into undecipherable gibberish.
Your business needs to be prepared for minor misfortunes as well as major disasters. This means creating an appropriate data backup strategy and an IT disaster recovery plan.
Developing a Data Backup Strategy
Your data backup strategy should fit your unique situation, including the type of data you store, your industry, and your security requirements. There are many factors that are involved:
Identify What Data Needs to Be Backed Up and When
Ideally, you should back up all your data every day, but sometimes that is impractical due to time or financial constraints. If that is the case, identify the data that is critical to your business so that it can be backed up daily. Any other data can then be backed up on a less rigorous, or incremental, schedule.
Select the Backup Techniques to Use
Long gone are the days when the only choice you had was whether to use differential or incremental backups with your full backups. There are many other options today, including system image backups and continuous data backups. To make things even more complicated, sometimes it is better to combine several backup techniques into a hybrid solution that is a more suitable fit for your company. There are also many security considerations to take into account to protect your valuable information.
Select Where to Store the Backup Files
Keeping multiple copies of your backups is very important. One copy should be kept onsite so you can access it easily when there are minor mishaps, such as an employee accidentally deleting a file. Another copy should be kept offsite in case a disaster destroys the onsite copy. Depending on your industry, you may be subject to government regulations regarding the storage of your data, which will affect the type of solution that makes sense for your business.
Determine How to Test the Backup Files
You do not want to find out that your backup files are corrupt and therefore useless when you are trying to recover from a ransomware attack. Backup files need to be tested to make sure they are available when you need them. Testing incremental and full restoration of your files will let you will know for certain that your backups will work. There are other validation methods, too.
Our team will review your business carefully, ask you pertinent questions, and then guide you on the data backup solutions that make the most sense for you. We can also perform validation testing to make sure your data can be restored as planned.
Backup vs Business Continuity
Devising an IT Disaster Recovery Plan
When some people see the term IT disaster recovery, they think backups. However, having backups is only one part of IT disaster recovery.
Essential Components
An effective IT disaster recovery plan will provide you with a roadmap to get essential systems running again quickly after a disaster. Your plan should incorporate recovery strategies for hardware, software, data, and connectivity. For each component, we can help you determine what has to be done to prepare for a disaster as well as what actions must take place if a calamity occurs.
For example, consider the software your company uses. A reliable plan will make sure that you can easily access copies of your operating system software and business-critical applications so that they can be quickly reinstalled after a disaster. Standardizing the operating system software and applications can make software recovery easier. To ensure that the software restoration goes smoothly after a disaster, part of the plan will specify who is responsible for carrying out this task and the order in which the software should be restored (most critical software first).
Business Continuity
If you have a business continuity plan, we will help you make sure the IT disaster recovery plan can meet the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) defined in the continuity plan.
We can also help you test the IT disaster recovery plan periodically, just like a fire drill, to make sure it works as designed. Our technical team has the business experience to evaluate each component of the plan so that your company is prepared and minimizes downtime.
You Do Not Have to Do It Alone
Developing a data backup strategy and IT disaster recovery plan can seem overwhelming, especially if you have never done it before. However, you do not have to do it alone. Our experienced technology experts can help you create and carry out these crucial processes so that you can rest easy.
We will ask you critical questions that you may not know to ask.
We are well versed in the pros and cons of the various options available to you. Our recommendations will take into account your data, systems, processes, industry and constraints.
Don’t let another day go by with your company exposed to risk that can cripple you or put you out of business. 1 800 324 0372.
