Is your business prepared in the event of a major technological failure? Do you have detailed and well-thought-out plans in place to ensure that your company can recover and function as needed?
You must be able to answer these crucial questions if you are a business owner. Several incidents can derail your organization due to the complexity of today’s technology:
- Data loss can occur if a server or hardware fails.
- Cyberattacks such as malware and phishing can knock your company offline.
- More basic problems, such as power outages or equipment damage caused by power grid outages or strong storms, can also cause havoc.
As a result, today’s organizations, more than ever, require a backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solution. Despite this, 23% of organizations with BDR strategies do not test them.
For these reasons, let’s take a closer look at data backup to see how BDR was handled in the past, how technology has transformed it today, and how your company can benefit from it all.
What is BDR?
Backup and disaster recovery (BDR) is a broad category of solutions that safeguard a company’s ability to continue operating in the event of a disaster.
BDR entails both proactive and reactive actions.
It is impossible to anticipate when a catastrophic catastrophe will occur; rather, it is a question of if rather than when. While it is unlikely that your company would be forced to survive a natural disaster, hardware does fail. On rare occasions, that hardware will hold crucial corporate data.
It helps to be prepared in advance of a hardware breakdown by backing up vital data to a separate source. It’s also useful to know what to do in the event of hardware failure or a natural disaster. Any BDR plan is made up of solutions to both of these problems.
Determine Your Budget
Backup solutions exist in a number of forms and sizes, which means that each one has a different price tag. This is when things start to get a bit complicated.
You’ll be working under a budget, and it may be tempting to scrimp to keep inside it. Were the savings worth it if your company lost its data and couldn’t restore it properly?
While you won’t make money from your backups, investing in a good solution will save you money in the long run.
Determining Your BDR Needs
You must first determine your backup requirements before backing up any data. This is your chance to assess the data in your company.
What data is crucial to the functioning of your company? What percentage of that data must be backed up?
You can’t put in place a backup solution unless you know what you’ll use it for. You’ll also have to make preparations for the future. You don’t want a backup solution that isn’t going to work in a few years.
Your backup solution will be heavily influenced by your company’s industry.
How Much Data Is Being Backed Up?
You must first determine your backup requirements before backing up any data. This is your chance to assess the data in your company.
If you back up your company’s data and information, you probably feel like you could always back up more. It’s only natural for you to assume that every bit of information is crucial.
It’s entirely up to you to decide what’s most important to your company.
You’ll have to consider what data and information your employees require to do their tasks properly. What information is irreplaceable? You may not consider contacts to be crucial, but the time it would take to gather the data is time you don’t want to spend.
Traditional tape backup creates full backups of your data, but only on a limited basis. The BDR system from IT Support Guys can back up data more often. When files are modified, our appliances update backups, making it a lot more convenient and less taxing solution for the average small business.
Which Data Are You Backing Up?
Consider your current backups. How much data do you have backed up? How much data do you want to save? In an ideal world, you’d back up as much data as possible.
It’s more than likely that certain data takes precedence over others. This would include any data that you are required by law to back up. It’s pointless to deal with compliance difficulties as a result of improper handling of secret or sensitive data.
How Often Do You Back up Your Data?
You’ve decided what data you’d like to back up. You must now decide how frequently you will run the backup.
It’s only useful to have a backup if it’s up to date. If substantial tasks have been started or completed, a backup that is only a few days old will be useless.
You’ll have to make up for the time spent restoring an out-of-date backup. Taking frequent backups may take extra time, but you’ll always have a current file if you need one.
You’ll want to look into a cloud-based BDR solution to obtain the optimal blend of timing and copying pertinent data.
A cloud-based synthetic-full backup only backs up files that have changed since the last backup. Without making numerous copies of data or files that haven’t been touched since they were initially backed up, everything stays up to date.
How Fast Can You Restore Data?
You don’t have much time to waste when your data is lost. To ensure that your data is restored and your organization operates with minimal interruption, you’ll need to act quickly.
Having a quick recovery solution will make data restoration simple and keep your employees working. You’ll need to make sure your infrastructure is ready to handle these events in order to accomplish this.
You’ll be able to ensure appropriate implementation and execution when you need it most if you test your backup and recovery solutions frequently.
Selecting a Platform
Since the days of a basic hard drive or tape backup, backup systems have advanced. While they are still in use, more companies are turning to the cloud for backup storage. The cloud is more popular than ever because of its ease of use and hosting alternatives.
Where Are Your Backups Stored?
Backups on-site are fantastic, but backups off-site are even better. If a user deletes a document by accident or if a workstation crashes, the data can be restored from an on-site backup. Something more secure is required for serious recovery attempts.
Traditional Data Backup
Traditionally, data backups were physical reels with magnetic tape that contained firm data. The reels were maintained on-site so that they could be accessed quickly in the event of an emergency. It seemed logical to keep the data backup on-site so that it could be retrieved quickly when needed.
Tape storage, on the other hand, is an inefficient method of backing up firm data. It can take hours to restore your data if you lose it. In reality, downtime caused by data restoration can be costly, with Gartner estimating that downtime costs $5,600 per minute.
That is simply a limitation of the technology used to extract data from cassettes. Your data could be completely destroyed if something happened to the actual cassettes, and there would be no way to recover it. USB drives and solid-state drives are in the same boat.
As a result, having several backups, both on-site and off-site, is the most successful backup approach for enterprises. This is in keeping with the 3-2-1 backup guideline, which should be applied to all company BDR plans as a starting point.
Traditional, physical backups can still help businesses achieve all three components of the 3-2-1 rule. However, if an off-site backup is required, having only physical backups can slow down the recovery process because the backup must be collected or delivered from its off-site location.
So, how can a company bridge the gap between a physical backup and an off-site backup?
Cloud-Based Backup and Disaster Recovery
Setting up a cloud-based BDR system for your company’s data and backup disaster recovery plan is a better option. Data backup on the cloud is more safe, efficient, and convenient than tape storage.
As previously said, cloud backup is more common when using snapshot-based backups, such as the synthetic full backup. When information has changed since the last backup, a snapshot-based backup is performed. This implies you’ll be getting more backups throughout the day, possibly every 15 minutes.
Having frequent backups reduces the risk of huge amounts of data being lost significantly. Your data may be kept both on-site and in the cloud with these backups, making access reliable and simple.
Are You Protecting Your Data Backups?
It is vital to backup your data. It’s equally crucial to keep it secure. This is especially true if your backup is stored locally.
There are expected incidents, such as natural disasters or equipment faults, as well as common dangers to your network, such as a hacker or virus. If you leave unprotected backups on-site during any of these occurrences, your data may be permanently destroyed.
This isn’t to say an on-site backup is a bad idea, having on-site backups is necessary when you need to recover lost information quickly. But having a backup to the backup off-site gives you the extra protection your information needs.
Making Your Recovery Plan
It’s pointless to have a backup if you can’t recover it when you need it. It’s just as crucial to have a backup recovery plan as it is to have a backup.
A recovery plan informs everyone involved about their specific role in the healing process. Important details, such as data prioritizing and what happens following data restoration, should be included in every strategy.
Test Your Backups
It’s been said a million times, but practice makes perfect. That’s why we’re repeating ourselves:
It’s time to put those backups to the test.
Testing your data backup and recovery strategy on a regular basis can ensure that it works when you need it most. Testing can help you identify inefficiencies, get everyone on the same page, and ensure that your firm can recover from a data loss catastrophe no matter what.
Every employee will be aware of their role in data recovery and will be able to ensure that it is carried out as promptly as feasible. You don’t want to discover the method isn’t working at the most inconvenient time.
Ultimate Benefit
To summarise, the benefit of cloud-based BDR is the ability to restore data to any hardware device. The BDR gadget is included in this. Whatever the source of the data loss, you’ll have immediate access to the back up the moment you need it. Instant access also means less downtime.
