Backup and Disaster Recovery solutions sound complicated, but with today’s technological advances, it can be simple. Regardless of the difficulty level, every company should have it in place.
Backup and Disaster Recovery are two separate tools working together to better protect your business from cyberattacks caused by hackers using tools like ransomware. If you’re not currently using a solution for your company, you shouldn’t wait any longer.
Let’s look at Backup and Disaster Recovery, how it works, and how you can implement it into your daily business activities.
What is Backup and Disaster Recovery?
Protecting your company’s critical data is more than just paying attention to cyberattacks. When considering challenges affecting your business, how often do you think of natural disasters or an employee accidentally deleting a critical file? Backup and Disaster Recovery, sometimes called BDR, address the above situations.
Backup and Disaster Recovery are two different sets of operations that make up an overall more extensive data security procedure and should run together. Combined, Backup and Disaster Recovery is a set of policies, and software solutions meant to maintain business continuity in the event of a security incident or natural disaster.
Setting up such a solution was complex and resource intensive in the past. However, with today’s technological advances, the barriers to adoption are extremely low. If you don’t have a solution in place, you should put one in place immediately. It may seem overwhelming, but starting with a NIST assessment can help you create a plan that meets your business needs.
What’s the Difference Between Backup and Disaster Recovery?
As mentioned earlier, there’s a difference between Backup and Disaster Recovery. When we talk about Backup, we’re talking about making copies of important files or pieces of data. Disaster Recovery is the plan and process for reestablishing access and business operations using those copies or files.
Backing up data can be done using four different types:
Full backup: this is a basic and complete backup that makes a copy of all your data to another media set like a disk, tape, or CD. Typically takes longer to perform and requires a lot of storage space.
Incremental backup: this is the copying of only the data that has changed since your last backup operation. Typically, it is faster and requires less storage space than a total backup solution.
Differential backup: this will copy all changed data from a previous backup, but every time it runs, it continues to copy all the data changed since the stated previous full backup.
Mirror backup: a real-time duplicate of the source being backed up. It would be best if you used it cautiously since when a file in the source is deleted, it will eventually be deleted in the mirror backup.
Backup solutions use various formats. Disaster Recovery is no different and has its types too. The most common types are RAID, Hard Drive, Removable, Optical, Digital, and Tape.
The Importance of Backup and Disaster Recovery
According to one report, over half of the businesses that were victims of ransomware attacks recovered their data through backup software. Gartner also reported that the average cost of downtime runs a business from $5,600 per minute or more to more than $300,000 per hour. The total cost will depend on many factors, including the type of business you run.
Regardless of your business, you don’t want to experience prolonged downtime. I don’t have to remind you that if customers and potential customers can access your website, you will retain business and customers.
How to Get Started?
A great place to start is by completing a NIST assessment. A NIST assessment is a standardized cybersecurity framework that will move your company’s IT environment into a place of regulatory compliance on a federal level. Once you’ve completed the NIST, you’ll better understand what sensitive data needs protection.
Once you’ve identified sensitive data, you can assemble the rest of your game plan. Some critical pieces to consider include the following:
- What type of backup format will you need?
- Decide how long you need to keep backups and how often you should run backups.
- Identify areas where your company can lose data.
- Ensure backups comply with data storage requirements.
- Train the staff on correct cybersecurity procedures.
When you’re up and running with Backup and Disaster Recovery, you get real-time monitoring, happy clients and customers, and peace of mind knowing you have a plan in place.
Key Terms
Below you’ll find a list of key terms you come by when looking to implement backup and disaster recovery.
Recovery time objective (RTO)
The amount of time it takes to recover normal business operations after an outage. You’ll need to consider RTO with your team as you create your Backup and Disaster Recovery plan. How much time will you lose, and how will the impact affect your bottom line?
Recovery point objective (RPO)
The amount of data you can afford to lose in a disaster. What does this mean? RPO means that you must decide if you should back up everything or if it’s okay to lose small data bits.
Failover
The process of automatically offloading tasks to a backup system in a way that’s easy for users. The offloading might happen at a secondary site with redundant systems ready to take over.
Failback
The process of switching back to the original systems after the disaster has passed.
Restore
The process of transferring backup data to your primary system or data center. The restore process is considered part of Backup rather than Disaster Recovery.
Disaster recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
A managed approach to Disaster Recovery.
Choosing the Right Solution for Your Business
When considering implementing a Backup and Disaster Recovery solution, remember that a solid system will help fight against ransomware attacks. Having a plan in place could prevent your businesses from closing permanently.
Start with a NIST assessment to determine potential security gaps in your current IT environment. After identifying these gaps, select the type of backup most beneficial for your business needs and how you’ll reestablish operations through your disaster recovery.
Even after putting a solution into place, always train employees on cybersecurity! The more employees feel prepared, the stronger your company’s cyber defenses will be.
The ONE 2 ONE Approach
At ONE 2 ONE, we offer a backup and disaster recovery solution for companies just like yours. Working with us means your business gets a managed approach to Backup and Disaster Recovery, which has many incredible benefits.
With the ONE 2 ONE approach, your business doesn’t have to worry about training in-house staff, you stay up to date with cutting-edge technology, and it’s cost-effective. We take out the complexity and provide you with peace of mind.
Still have questions? Reach out today, and we’ll connect you with a Backup and Disaster Recovery expert to explain the solution and all the benefits!