It is officially one week until World Backup Day—the global occasion intended to raise awareness about the importance of backups and the proper maintenance and management of them. While we are in full support of this initiative, we also want to make something clear: data backup shouldn’t be an annual consideration, it needs to be a priority each and every day.
Let’s discuss the basic tenets of business continuity for a while, and how your backup and disaster recovery (BDR) preparations should be shaped to be most effective.
What Does a Proper Business BDR Strategy Involve?
Our first recommendation is that your backup strategy should follow a policy known as the 3-2-1 Backup Rule. This rule has three parts:
- You maintain at least three copies of your data
- You store these copies in at least two different storage media
- You keep at least one of these copies offsite, preferably, in the cloud
This is the most basic way to describe the policy. However, we can share some deeper insights regarding quality backups.
What a Success-Driven BDR Implementation Should Include:
Layered Redundancies
Admittedly, while “redundant” isn’t typically used as a positive descriptor, your BDR preparations are a notable example. In this case, redundancy simply means you have extra copies of your data to fall back on if needed. You don’t need to stop there, either. Your backups need to receive power in order to work, so providing redundant power supplies helps insulate you further. The same can be said of your Internet connection. Maintaining multiple connections makes it less likely that you’ll be without access.
Image-Based Backups
It shouldn’t be a surprise that migrating over a complete copy of your data is faster than trying to rewrite each file that was impacted by data loss. This is how an image-based backup functions. The speed that this approach provides is a real asset in an actual data loss event.
Comprehensive Protections
Clearly, your backups are important—it certainly wouldn’t help you to find out that someone had managed to infect your backup with malware, or had been stealing your data as you backed it up. To prevent this from happening, your backups need to be just as protected as your original data copies should be, with all data encrypted as it is sent to them for added safety.
We’re Here to Help!
Reach out to SRS Networks to learn more about how we can help you deal with your data backups, as well as the rest of your business’ essential IT. Give us a call at (831) 758-3636 today.