Backup and disaster recovery
Your business is your livelihood. It’s also your responsibility to protect it from unexpected events that can cause catastrophic damage. I’m talking about natural disasters, fire and theft—but also human error or malicious intent. Backup and disaster recovery services are vital pieces of your protection plan because they ensure that you have the necessary tools in place to recover quickly when disaster strikes.
Your plan must be proactive, not reactive.
A proactive plan is one that you prepare for ahead of time, before disaster strikes. An example of this would be having a fire extinguisher in your office to minimize the damage from a small fire. A reactive plan is one that you prepare after something bad happens, like fire safety training after a disaster has occurred. Both methods have their benefits, but proactively planning can prevent disasters altogether while reactively responding can only deal with their aftermath.
It’s important to note that proactive and reactive are not mutually exclusive; it’s possible (and often recommended) to combine both types of plans in your overall strategy for backup and recovery. For example: You could have an offsite storage facility where all business data is backed up regularly, so if there’s an incident at your location where everything needs saving immediately (e.g., flood or fire), then the information can be retrieved quickly without losing any time while waiting on the local authorities or insurance company getting involved first before retrieving copies from another location outside city limits where it wouldn’t be accessible otherwise except via long-distance transportation such as plane rides or bus rides depending on how far away each respective location might be from each other instead of relying solely upon telecommunication services such as phones/fax lines/internet connections which may not always work properly due to situations beyond anyone’s control such as natural disasters resulting in power outages thus rendering them unavailable temporarily until service providers get things back up again thus potentially causing delays when trying send emails/faxes etcetera
Your plan must be comprehensive, covering everything you need to recover.
You should have a comprehensive plan to protect your business and its data. The best plans are comprehensive, covering everything you need to recover.
Your plan should include all your data, including your employees’ personal information (e.g., social security numbers) and any other personally identifiable information that falls under privacy laws in the U.S., Europe, or Asia. It should also include your hardware and software—including mobile devices—even if they’re stored off-site with a third party vendor or cloud storage service like Amazon Web Services (AWS). Your plan should also include backup and disaster recovery tools such as tape libraries, remote replication products like Commvault’s Simpana®, cloud-based solutions from providers such as Veeam® Backup & Replication™ or Carbonite®, or both local backup solutions for on-premises servers along with cloud backups for offsite servers and workstations. Finally, make sure that you have an updated list of vendors who can help you recover from a disaster if needed; this includes those who provide IT support services but also those who may be able to provide replacement technology when necessary: printers/copiers; networking equipment; etc.;
You need to ensure that all data is safe, including your employees’ personal information.
Protecting your business data and ensuring that it’s safe is obviously critical to the success of your business. However, you also need to ensure that all of your employees’ personal information and files are being safeguarded too.
In fact, protecting employee data is equally as important as business data when it comes to IT security. Why? Because employees’ personal information can be just as sensitive or valuable as company assets — if not more so. For example:
- Employee records contain sensitive information such as names, addresses, social security numbers (SSNs), date of birth (DOBs), driver’s license numbers (DLNs), passport numbers/passport photos and bank account details — all things criminals would love to get their hands on if they could!
- Personal contact lists contain phone numbers, email addresses and home addresses which could be used for identity theft or fraud purposes against those people whose contact details are shared with you by your employees or customers during the course of doing business with them.
- Emails from customers often contain credit card details which must be stored securely by businesses under PCI DSS regulations governing how merchants handle credit card payments online
You can’t just count on your hard drive for backup or your router for security.
The backup you keep on your server should be an offsite one. And it should be encrypted. Ideally, you’d have multiple copies in different places that are regularly tested for integrity and retrievability—and if possible, even more than one version of the same file that can be used to recover from a disaster.
Backups are useless if you can’t access them when you need them.
Backup and disaster recovery are two important pieces of your business’s protection from the unexpected. If someone accidentally deletes an important file, or if there’s a fire in the building, you need to be able to restore data quickly and easily. Backups must be accessible when you need them—and that means that your backup solution needs to run on remote servers or cloud services so that it can be accessed anywhere in the world.
If you wait until a disaster happens, it’s too late.
If you wait until a disaster happens, it’s too late. You can’t just assume that your data is safe. You need to have a plan in place before the disaster happens.
Example of a Disaster: A fire breaks out at your office, and all of your employees have to evacuate the building. This means that they won’t be able to access any of their files or emails while they’re outside of the building.*
- imagine an evacuation scene here
Backup and disaster recovery are vital pieces of your business’s protection from the unexpected.
Backup and disaster recovery are vital pieces of your business’s protection from the unexpected. You may not think about backups very often, but they’re always running in the background, ensuring that you can recover from a disaster by recovering data from a previous time point.
Backups are useless if you can’t access them when you need them, though. It’s also important to realize that just having one backup isn’t enough; multiple copies of your data spread across different storage devices is ideal for security purposes (and it makes it possible for you to recover quickly if something happens). Your router won’t offer this kind of protection—it only offers security on an internal network level.
Conclusion
If you’re not backing up your data, you’re taking a huge risk. If something happens to your computer or network and you can’t access your backups, then all of your data may be lost forever. It’s important that you have a plan in place so that if something goes wrong, everything will still run smoothly.
