When it comes to data recovery, even the savviest IT leaders don’t have all the facts. In fact, only 30 percent reported having a fully documented disaster recovery strategy in place. Our cloud experts experience this disconnect in data backup best practices all too often. IT staff know that gaps exist — but fail to realize how a failed restore affects every area of operations.
Overcome Disaster With Data Backup Best Practices
As a cloud managed services provider, we’ve educated our clients on the complexities surrounding backing up and restoring every layer of their IT infrastructure. Here are some dangerous misconceptions we often hear from clients — and data backup best practices to secure your data.
Not Testing Your Data Recovery Process
No matter how strong your IT team thinks your data recovery process is, you will never know whether it is actually capable of performing as well as you expect it to until you either conduct a complex series of tests that simulate how it will respond in a particular situation or experience a problem that compromises your data. This means that being intentional about taking steps to better understand how your data recovery process is most likely to respond in various scenarios by conducting regular tests is a must.
While there is no guarantee that your process will respond exactly how you expect it to, one hundred percent of the time, even if you are as diligent as possible about testing, doing so will give your IT team a much better idea of what the most likely results of scenarios your business may experience look like. Some common data recovery testing methods include:
- Walkthrough testing
- Tabletop Testing
- Various Types of technical tests
Underestimating the Time and Business Impact of Restoring Compromised Data
Sure, your data may be stored safely offsite. But when a disaster occurs, how long will it take to restore and access that data?
Consider the value of the data and financial repercussions if your organization couldn’t immediately retrieve that information. The loss in productivity, revenue, and customer trust quickly amounts to thousands of dollars.
Speed to recovery is critical — and failing to plan for recovery time can result in huge costs to your business. Classify your applications based on how long the business can go without them to prioritize mission-critical data.
Being Unaware of the Many Layers the Data Backup and Restoration Process Involves
Making sure you have a copy of everything your business needs to get back up and running as quickly as possible is not as simple as making a single decision. Your IT team will need to take a careful inventory of the various parts that make up your infrastructure and determine what your best options for making sure that each layer is thoroughly backed up to prevent gaps in areas you may not have even realized existed.
Your team will also need to consider what your approach to making sure that you are able to recover compromised data in each of these areas should look like. Depending on the nature and unique needs of your business, this infrastructure may consist of a wide range of files, databases, physical and virtual machines, and other components.
Not Modifying Your Business’s Backup Strategy to Align with Current Best Practices
Your reliance on technology and the amount that compromised data has the potential to harm your business is increasing every year, which means that relying on older backup methods for too long has the potential to cause unexpected problems for your business. While it can be tempting to stick to strategies and products that have served your business well for years, understanding and incorporating newer technology can be a much more successful path to take.
Businesses should generally review their backup and restoration strategies, compare them with current best practices, and make any needed adjustments at least once per year. Certain organizations that handle especially sensitive data, such as those in the medical and financial industries, and those in the defense industrial space working with controlled unclassified data (CUI), should do so more often.
While every business is unique, many data backup and recovery best practices can be applied to nearly any industry. Some of the most important best practices to be aware of when optimizing your data backup and recovery strategies include:
- Increasing the frequency of your backups to a minimum of several times each day to reduce the amount of data that may be lost and need to be recovered between backups.
- Aligning your backup strategy to service-level demands
- Following the 3-2-1 backup rule (keeping three copies of their data with two stored onsite and one stored offsite)
- Using cloud backup as one of the multiple methods your business uses to decrease your likelihood of losing your backup copy
- Automating as many aspects of your disaster recovery process as possible to reduce your likelihood of human error
- Choosing a more permanent method for data retention instead of leaving it in your backup for too long to ensure that your backups are fully capable of serving their true purpose
- Taking steps to protect your computers, tablets, smartphones, and other endpoints to reduce the amount that your recovery process will ultimately need to be used
Oversimplifying the Backup Process and Including Too Little Emphasis on Recovery
Data backup and recovery best practices are constantly evolving, which means that relying too heavily on what has always been done or only focusing on a specific aspect of the larger process can lead to missing a key element of protecting your data.
Many businesses place plenty of importance on ensuring that they have a strong backup process in place, but no backup solution is infallible. Far too many of these businesses assume that their backup process will be all they will need to regain access to compromised data, which leads them to largely ignore the second stage in the process.
Only Using Hard Drives or Server Snapshots to Back Up Data
We often talk to IT staff that believe backing up their hard drive or taking server snapshots is enough to safeguard their data.
When you rely on server and database snapshots, someone must hang onto them. But what if that person goes out of town? Without an automated backup process, you’re putting the company in the hands of one or two people, which can be unreliable. Physical backups also require extra storage. With time, this cost can grow exponentially.
So, what’s the solution?
Build Your Disaster Recovery Solution in the Cloud
Preparing for a far-off disaster scenario might not seem critical today — especially while juggling a growing list of IT tasks. But building your disaster recovery solution in the cloud will eliminate the uncertainty that data will restore after an outage.
Choosing a cloud backup solution eliminates the need for external hard drives (or other storage media) and the costs associated with storing those hard drives.
With a cloud-based backup solution like Azure, you can configure the solution to automatically back up during idle times. You can even retrieve data on a smartphone or other portable wireless devices, reducing the time to recovery. Read our Azure backup review here.
An effective backup and recovery plan is more than just an IT necessity—it’s a cornerstone of your organization’s resilience and success. By ensuring continuous data availability, you minimize downtime and safeguard your operations against unexpected disruptions. A well-implemented plan doesn’t just protect your data; it also optimizes storage costs, shields your business from financial loss, and maintains the efficiency you rely on to keep things running smoothly. Additionally, it empowers your team by reducing disruptions, enabling them to stay focused and productive, no matter the circumstances.
In today’s fast-paced business environment, a robust backup and recovery strategy isn’t just an investment—it’s a strategic advantage. Contact us today to discover how our services allow your business to thrive.
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Sales@AgileIT.com