Most businesses don’t have what it takes to survive a hardware failure or natural disaster, and we don’t mean in terms of “grit.” What we mean is in the sheer technological capacity to recover their data and continue operations. It’s bizarre, too, how easy data backup can be, provided you follow these three key tenets. With a little help from a qualified backup professional, your business can stay resilient even in the worst of times.
At the heart of any successful data backup strategy is the 3-2-1 rule.
This framework mandates three copies of your data, two of which are on different storage mediums, and one of which is located in a secure off-site location. This goes beyond a simple sync with your cloud solution; this is comprehensive and designed for business use, not consumer use. The 3-2-1 rule includes maintaining local backups on network-attached storage, automatic cloud replication and version technology to help you roll out specific versions of your data from the past, and physically isolated backups to keep malware from spreading or natural disasters from wiping out your infrastructure.
This is why you need at least three copies of your data. Otherwise, you’re putting your business in danger needlessly.
Today’s ransomware will actively seek out your data backups and wipe them out before you have a chance to respond, so you need a strategy that prevents this from happening.
Enter the immutable backup layer. These files cannot be changed, modified, or deleted, even if the threat gets administrative control. This basically ensures that even if a hacker manages to get past all your lines of defense, you’ll still have a way to recover, even if it seems like there’s no coming back.
If you don’t commit to this level of immutability, then you’ll continue to be a target, and you’ll continue to live in fear of ransomware. That’s no way to run a business.
Do you actively test your backups? If you don’t, then you might as well not have a plan in place.
Most businesses that have a data backup system will see in the backend that the backup is “verified,” but what does that even mean? Without carrying out a full restoration, there’s no way of knowing that the backup will work. We recommend you perform a restoration to check on Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective at least once per quarter; this should also include file-level restoration, bare-metal restoration, and data corruption checks.
If this all sounds like too much to handle on your own, no worries. That’s why we’re here. Let First Column IT handle the testing so you can focus on your business. Learn more today by calling us at (571) 470-5594.
