Backups are the answer many organizations have for preparing their disaster recovery plans. Preparing your backup correctly, however, is often the difference between success and failure, between risk or readiness. Here’s the top five considerations to your backup:
How often do you back up your data?
Most organizations will, by now, have at least some rudimentary backup – among other things, it is increasingly common for this to be a legal requirement in many nations and markets. However, according to a recent report, while 91% of all organizations back up their data only about 26% actually do it daily.
Long intervals between backups mean that when disaster strikes, even in an otherwise perfect restore you’ll be losing days, weeks or even months’ worth of data and work.
When have you last tested your process?
According to a report, more than 50% of all backups actually fail when data is being restored. Ensuring that your process is regularly tested and everything is functional and up to date is a necessity of maintaining a good security posture – Regularly review and retire unsupported systems, and ideally maintain an inventory of all hardware and software to track patch status.
Can you restore to a different device?
When setting up backups, it is imperative you keep an eye to the future and make sure that you have a plan in place for not only the more commonly considered threats. The more prosaic ones can be something as simple as hardware failure – can you access backups from a different device or system? If you lose access to a particular account, can you still retrieve that account’s data?
Where are your backups physically located?
Some organizations may be tempted to keep their backups centrally located. This concentrates everything in a single point of failure. You have to consider everything from acts of god – fires, earthquakes and so on – to burglary or something as mundane as a power failure in that location.
On the other hand, there are large companies that only rely on remote cloud networks for data storage and backup. This has a similar set of issues, merely exported to a different data storage location offsite and introducing considerations like internet outages. The solution is multiple copies, preventing a single point of failure.
Do you have a cold backup?
A so-called “cold backup” is an airgapped, external backup disconnected from your normal systems. This means that malware locking up your live system is – hopefully – prevented from also infecting the backup.
Ransomware will often deliberately try to target your backup solution precisely because it forms the lynchpin of many disaster recovery plans. Ensure that your planning takes this into account and minimizes your risk.
Protect your data with TECH-ARROW
Our contentACCESS Backup for Microsoft 365 allows us to better cater to our customers by providing them options tailored to what they are specifically looking for, whether that be a pure and simple backup for security and preventing data loss or a comprehensive archive offering compliance options and long-term retention.
To aid in this, our backup offers:
- A unitary backup for all your Microsoft 365 business data
- Just-in-time backup options for guaranteed capture
- One-click restore
- Easy implementation of the 3-2-1 backup rule
In addition, with Backup+ we offer the same end-user access possibilities as offered by our contentACCESS Archive, allowing you to more flexibly work with backed up files and potentially do without full restores of legacy files.
Interested? Contact us to find out more, or download a basic version of our backup for free to try it out for yourself!
Your Data In Your Hands – With TECH-ARROW
