Time for businesses to revamp their outdated back-up strategy

World Back-up day is celebrated on March 31 and the ways in which enterprises can potentially lose data are also growing. With many teams now forced to work from home during the pandemic, it is all the more important than ever before for organizations to ensure that their data is stored efficiently and securely. Reliable back-up has become a necessity in the current situation and is no more limited to just an option as maintaining profitable business operations and the operations of the customers relies on it. Here are the top five tips for businesses looking to revamp their obsolete back-up strategies:

Back it up regularly: Ensuring that back-ups happen daily especially if the systems suffer a data corruption, a breach or complete data loss. Sure, one will have a starting point, but if crucial data isn’t backed-up regularly, the restored data will be missing critical activity that took place since it was last backed-up. This can turn into an expensive project to re-populate, not to mention the human resources that could be spent on critical data and applications vs back-ups.

Follow the 3-2-1-1 rule: This is a rule that has been proven true time and time again. Make sure that one always keeps three copies of the data, using two different storage media types (object, flash, HDD, tape), one offsite (physically separate from the building such as DR site), and one offline (completely disconnected from your network). Keeping a clearly-defined data copy offline and air-gapped to protect against any potential malware attacks will enables one and their employees to retrieve that data and get back-up to speed faster and back to business sooner in the case where one’s network connected copies are compromised.

Tier your backups: When evaluating data backup needs, understand the organizational service-level agreements (SLAs) to help one to segregate the data basis the importance of the same. This will help determine which type of back-up technology is best suited for each organizational needs. Defining the data’s temperature can uncover both economical and operational benefits that weren’t feasible before, including savings on soft costs such as power and cooling.

Revisit your backup plan quarterly or bi-annually: Revisiting the backed-up data on a regular basis is very crucial. Revisiting a plan once a year used to be enough, but this is not the case anymore. With the increase in current threats and market conditions, revisiting the back-up plan could prove to be beneficial in the long term. Cyberattacks, human error and natural disaster can occur unexpectedly. Today, cyberthreats are becoming more audacious so IT professionals need to step it up to mitigate this risk and ensure their back-up plan is reliable and well tested.

Test, test, test: I can’t stress this enough, back-up copies should not only be recoverable, but they should be predictably recovered. In other words, make sure one test, test, and test again for the integrity of the back-up recovery system and verify it works accordingly. Not testing restores, underestimating time to restore/not testing time to restore, not having the appropriate back-up schedules (frequency, back-up types – incremental, full), and not having an endpoint break/fix process in place could prove to be disastrous to an organisation. This can lead to crisis mode management and possibly loss of millions of dollars.

Authored by:- -Diana Salazar, Product Marketing Manager, Enterprise Back-up & Archive, Quantum

(The views expressed in this article are by -Diana Salazar, Product Marketing Manager, Enterprise Back-up & Archive, Quantum. Technuter.com doesn’t own any responsibility for it.)