BEI Blog

When you have a thorough and powerful data backup strategy in place at your business, you are protecting your operations, your employees, and your customers from an array of terrible scenarios. Unfortunately, many businesses don’t think of data loss in the terms it should be considered in, a complete travesty. Today, we thought we would briefly describe the long and short of data backup and recovery practices that can put your business in a position to secure and restore your data should it be corrupted, destroyed, or stolen.

A business’ data needs to be considered a priority, which means that its protection should be prioritized accordingly. One facet of doing so is maintaining a backup with a strategy in compliance to best practices. To accomplish this, your backup should feature something that isn’t often considered a benefit: redundancy.

Data recovery is more a strategy than a solution. You first need to keep a regular backup to ensure that you aren’t losing large chunks of productivity. Then, you need to have a strategy to efficiently recover data if it is corrupted, lost, or stolen. Today, we’ll talk a little bit about some situations that businesses run into that would spark data recovery.

Tomorrow is World Backup Day, which--considering the current business climate as the coronavirus pandemic rages on--seems only too appropriate. Let’s discuss why times like these make it only too clear how critical a business continuity strategy is, especially when supported by the right backup solution.

Your business’ data is a key component to its success, and with a managed service provider on your side, it becomes even more beneficial for you to put to use. As we carry on with our series describing the value of a relationship with a managed service provider, we’ll look at a few ways that your business can benefit from the data services that this relationship can provide.

A backup is a critical consideration for any business, in more ways than one. We have a tendency to immediately jump to “business-ending disaster” whenever we mention a backup. However, we’ve realized that this may have the unfortunate side effect of lulling you into a false sense of complacency - after all, what are the chances of being struck by a “business-ending disaster?”

If you subscribe to Murphy’s Law, you understand why it is so crucial for every business to have a backup solution planned, put into place, and prepared for the worst. However, not every business should go about putting their backup strategy together in the same way. After all, their needs will be different, based on their industry, the data they store, and a variety of other factors.

Here, we’ll go over five steps you should follow to be sure you aren’t missing anything important from your backup strategy.

1. Figuring Out What You Need From Your Backup
Your first step is to determine what it is you will need from whatever backup solution you ultimately implement, because without this determination already made, you will not be able to narrow down your options enough to begin the process. Furthermore, it wouldn’t do to underestimate your actual needs and procure a solution that isn’t going to cut the mustard when you need it to.

The industry you operate within will influence the requirements of whatever backup solution you ultimately do select. Your particular vertical may inherently require vast amounts of meticulously organized data, which will mean you need a backup system that can accommodate that data in whatever format it is in. Is some of your data of particular importance? You may want to consider prioritizing that data, and finding a solution that allows you to do that. This includes also taking the potential risks to your data into account, including malicious actors and natural events, as you compose a list of security, usability, and reliability standards that your final choice must meet.

2. Establishing Your Budget
Now that you know your baseline requirements for your backup, you need to ensure that your business is financially prepared to implement it. Different approaches to backup will vary in cost and pricing structure, as well as potentially cost different amounts where employee training is concerned - after all, some options will require an employee to manage it, which will require an investment into properly training them to do so.

While it may be tempting to try and cut costs and minimize your investment as much as possible, this isn’t the place to do it. Your data backup, while it admittedly won’t generate you any profit, helps prevent your business from losing money through lost business and downtime.

3. Picking a Platform
It wasn’t too terribly long ago that keeping a backup just meant that you had an extra copy of your data saved in a spare hard drive. Now, there are more options to leverage.

For example, instead of a spare hard drive, there are software-based options available that act as a backup solution, as well as backup options available through cloud service providers. Many companies are now electing, however, to implement a hybrid solution. This combines the convenience of a software-based backup with the resilience of a cloud-based backup solution. Combined, this makes fully leveraging the capabilities of either backup method much easier, with practically ensured access to your stored data as needed.

4. Making a Recovery Plan
What good is a backup if it can’t be put into use, just because nobody knows how? No good at all.

This is why, in addition to your backup, you need to have a detailed plan written out that will allow anyone to enact it as needed. Make sure that this plan includes important details, like variables that could affect the recovery process, which data should be prioritized, and what to do after your data is restored. If there are other members of your organization who will have a role to play in the recovery process, they need to be familiarized with the processes and qualifications outlined within.

5. Testing it All Out
On a related note, what good is a backup if it doesn’t work? Again, it isn’t going to help you much, so it’s going to be pretty useless to you when you need it. In order to avoid heartbreak and devastation when you only discover a failed backup when you’re relying on it to work, you should regularly test your backup solution.

There are a lot of things to consider when testing your backup: that it works, that you can restore your data back from it successfully, that your employees know how to handle it, and that you’re testing it regularly to make sure something doesn’t go wrong.

BEI has quite a bit of experience in assisting small and medium-sized businesses with their data backup and recovery needs. To find out how we can help you, give us a call at (844) BIZ-EDGE.

March 31, 2018 is World Backup Day. Data is a commodity, but unlike other commodities--it can be replicated without hurting its value. As a result, data backup has become a critical need for the modern business. World Backup Day has been created to remind people to protect their assets by backing up their files.

Data Backup is now a mission-critical process that is neglected far too often, unfortunately. In fact, studies show that 30 percent of people have never backed up their data - despite being inundated by a myriad of situations where data could be lost, stolen, or corrupted. With 113 phones being stolen every minute, and 1-in-10 computers being infected with viruses and malware every month, protecting your data has to become a priority. Frankly, data is a very easy thing to lose without the right precautions in place, which is precisely why World Backup Day was created to promote data protection.

Nobody wants to see an organization fail, and the statistics for a business’ survival after a data loss event indicate that if you are not strategically protecting your digital assets, your company is one situation away from catastrophe. Maintaining a comprehensive data backup can negate the effects of such an event, allowing your business to bounce back.

In order to do so effectively, however, there need to be certain standards met by any backup solution your business puts in place. They include:

Redundancy
It isn’t uncommon for businesses to streamline their operations, eliminating redundancies wherever they can. When it comes to data backup, the opposite is actually preferable. To optimize your data’s survivability, your backup should consist of more than one copy of your data - safety in numbers, so to speak.

Frequency
Of course, there’s a limit to how useful an older data backup will be for your business. The progress that would be lost between the time of the backup and the time of the data loss incident would be less effective than one that is current. The best data backups are taken frequently enough to protect your progress without causing downtime.

Off-Site
Your backup won’t do you much good if the same disaster destroys it along with your original data. To keep this from happening, you need to make sure that your backup is kept separate and disconnected from your network.

Your business needs its data in order to be successful. Observing World Backup Day is a great opportunity to ensure that it will be safe. Visit the official World Backup Day website for more information.