Without data, businesses can lose valuable insights, miss out on growth opportunities, and experience operational inefficiencies. Unfortunately, it’s easy to lose data to hardware failures, cyberattacks, natural catastrophes, software glitches, and human errors. These incidents can set back their operations and financial stability for months or even years. The only safety net businesses have against data loss incidents is a robust data backup and recovery strategy.
What is data backup and recovery?
Data backup involves replicating and storing data in a secondary location separate from the original source for safekeeping. Meanwhile, data recovery is the process of retrieving copies of the lost or corrupted data from the backup and restoring it to the original location. These two processes are crucial for ensuring that data is preserved and can be retrieved in case of a disaster.
While there are several types of backup solutions that organizations can use, some of the most common include:
- Full backup – This involves creating comprehensive copies of all data, such as documents, media files, software, and system files. Full backups are particularly valuable in situations where reverting to a specific point in time is crucial. However, due to the exhaustive nature of full backups, they can be time-consuming and resource-intensive to perform.
- Incremental backup – This method only captures the data additions and modifications since the last backup. It results in smaller backup sizes, which is why it’s quicker to perform and requires less storage space.
- Differential backup – This method takes a snapshot of the changes made to data since the last full backup. Unlike incremental backups, differential backups do not consider the changes made since the last differential backup; instead, they accumulate changes from the last full backup. Subsequent differential backups continue to accumulate changes, providing a snapshot of the data at different points in time.
Why is data backup and recovery important?
Data backup and recovery are essential for several reasons, including:
Maximizing business continuity
Data loss incidents can significantly disrupt business operations, affecting productivity and profitability. For most businesses, a few hours spent redoing lost work can result in thousands of dollars in losses and reputational damage. By investing in powerful backup and recovery strategies, companies can quickly recover from data loss incidents, minimize downtime, and avoid expensive losses.
Creating a safety net against cyberattacks
In a cyberattack, data can be stolen, corrupted, and deleted. In ransomware attacks, in particular, all the victim’s data can encrypted, and access can only be restored after hefty sums of money are paid. A well-implemented data backup and recovery strategy enables organizations to restore their systems to a pre-attack state, minimizing downtime and the potential financial losses of a security breach.
Protect against disaster and hardware failures
Natural disasters, power outages, and hardware failures can all result in data loss. Businesses can avoid data loss by backing up data to a secure off-site location that’s unaffected by local disasters or hardware failures. This ensures that data is available for recovery even if the original source is damaged.
Meeting compliance and regulatory requirements
Many data privacy laws and regulations such as HIPAA or PCI DSS will often require businesses to secure the availability of customer data and protect it from loss or destruction. Implementing robust backup and recovery strategies enables organizations to comply with these requirements and avoid massive legal penalties.
What are the best data backup and recovery strategies for businesses?
To develop an effective data backup and recovery strategy, businesses should implement the following best practices:
Identify critical data
Some data are more valuable than others. For instance, databases containing customer information, financial records, or intellectual property are crucial for business operations and should be given the highest priority in a backup plan.
Meanwhile, less valuable data such as company newsletters or marketing materials can be excluded from regular backups.
Identifying these critical data sets will help organizations determine the appropriate backup frequency and storage requirements.
Determine backup frequency based on risk exposure
The backup frequency is highly dependent on the type of data being backed up and the level of risk exposure. Financial records and customer information are often considered high-risk because they’re mission-critical and are highly targeted by cybercriminals. For these data types, companies may require daily or by-the-minute automatic backup processes. Meanwhile, low-risk data are those that businesses can stand to lose and are less likely to affect business operations if lost, such as marketing materials. Organizations can opt to back up this data on a weekly or monthly basis.
Follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy
The 3-2-1 backup strategy is a popular method for creating data redundancy and ensuring data is readily available for recovery. This strategy involves having:
- 3 Copies of data – This requires having one primary copy on the original system, a secondary backup copy stored locally, and a third backup stored off site.
- 2 Storage media types – Using two or more different storage media types such as hard drives, tapes, or cloud storage ensures that if one fails, there’s still a backup available on the other media.
- 1 Offsite copy – Storing backups in a secure off-site location ensures data can be recovered even if the original source is damaged or inaccessible. Most businesses will typically choose cloud storage for their off-site backups due to its accessibility, scalability, and security.
Use a reliable cloud backup service
Cloud backups are a great way to store data in a secure, off-site location. Many cloud backup services offer automatic backups, making it easier for businesses to regularly back up their data without any manual intervention.
The ideal backup provider will typically offer additional security features to protect your data, such as 99.9% service uptime, end-to-end encryption, geo-redundancy, advanced access controls, and highly secure data center facilities.
Document the recovery plan
Having a documented recovery plan is crucial in ensuring that data can be restored quickly and efficiently. Data recovery documentation should cover everything, including the steps to initiate data recovery, which data to prioritize, backup login credentials, the location of backup copies, and contact information for IT teams or backup providers.
To cover all bases, recovery plans should outline all the different procedures for different data loss scenarios, such as accidental deletion, system failure, or natural disaster. This will ensure that all team members are aware of what to do in any situation. It’s also vital to regularly review and update this documentation to reflect any changes in the company’s infrastructure or data storage methods.
Test backup and recovery
Regularly testing backups and recovery procedures is as important as creating backups. Testing helps identify potential issues, ensures data integrity, and verifies the effectiveness of the recovery process. This approach enables businesses to address any shortcomings in their backup systems before a real data loss event occurs.
An experienced managed IT services provider like Dynamic Solutions Group will help your business implement a reliable data backup and recovery strategy. Call us today to safeguard your data.
