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Do You Have A Disaster Recovery And Backup Plan In Place?
Disaster Recovery and Backup Plan
Backups are important and there are many ways data can be lost. Disasters like hardware failure and damaged computers, natural disasters, human error or even disgruntled employees, all these can happen suddenly without warning. Ransomware is always in the news and media and cyber criminals are continually finding new ways of entering businesses to encrypt data, hijack files and then demand a ransom in the form of payment to unlock data. A data backup or disaster recovery plan should be standard in any businesses operating procedure. A small amount of time invested in creating or preparing for any disaster is minute in compared to weeks perhaps even months to recover from a serious data loss.
If your business does not have a disaster recovery or backup plan in place, here are few things to consider,
Have a strong backup vault, your final layer is your vault. Avoid losing everything by using the 3-2-1 method or strategy;
- 3 Copies - store them on two separate places like a local drive, network share (NAS or Server) or cloud backup.
- 2 Types of Media – Retain the original file plus two backups
- 1 Kept off Site – Keep one backup off site as additional insurance and peace of mind.
With this type of plan in place, even if cyber criminals breach the system, strong backups help you get your data back.
How can backups be implemented
For any small business a backup solution can be as simple as an external hard drive, which are not very reliable and hard drives have a shelf life and can wear out or damaged due to being dropped etc, so do not rely on one external drive. Deploying an online backup is equally as important.
Backing Up or Archiving
There is a difference to consider whether to backup data or archive data. To backup data is a strategy to protect data that is currently in use and be able to recover from hardware failure, loss or corruption of data. Archiving is for long term data retention. So, in a nutshell backup is data that you are actively using which is up to date and if files or a folders need to be restored, while archive backups could be done once a month and is perhaps data you no longer use but you need to retain for possible future reference or record purposes.
What to Back Up
Data that is important and essential to keep your business running should always be backed up. This could be anything from financial records, patient/customer records, HR, HMRC records, databases, sales and purchasing and any critical information you cannot afford to lose. It is also important to use encryption methods of your businesses data on your backups in case of loss or theft of your backups.
Should SaaS (Software as a Service) Data Should be Backed Up
These SaaS applications like Google Dropbox or even Microsoft 365 cloud-based applications are safe, but they are on someone else’s servers, who knows things can go wrong in this world, better to safe than sorry. The 3-2-1 backup strategy is to keep data in at least 3 different places. One of the common ways SaaS data can be lost is due to employees intentionally or accidently deleting data.
How often should I backup
Most backup applications or systems work by initially backing up all of your data, then running incremental backups every night and updating only the data that has changed from the previous day
Cloud Backup for Small Businesses
Backing up to the cloud is convenient, as this can be done overnight and without having to change eternal drives and transport them to and fro, or having to think about attaching drives etc. It is also very reliable and once a plan is in place it just works, with a daily email report if the backup was successful or not, giving you peace of mind. Encryption can be used for added security. The costs are low without the extra staff and on premises backup hardware to maintain
At Control IT Solutions we help businesses with cloud-based backup solutions for Windows or Macs, Servers/NAS Drives for the safe and secure backup of your data.
