When it comes to data backups, you can’t afford to leave anything to chance. The reason is simple—data loss is common and is caused by a range of factors including malicious activity, human error, or system failure. Gaps in your strategy can be an expensive mistake and can cause serious damage to your business in the blink of an eye. Below are 6 business data backup tips from Chris Coleman, our Director of Technology.
When it comes to data backups, you can’t afford to leave anything to chance. The reason is simple—data loss is common and is caused by a range of factors including malicious activity, human error, or system failure. Gaps in your strategy can be an expensive mistake and can cause serious damage to your business in the blink of an eye. Below are 6 business data backup tips from Chris Coleman, our Director of Technology.
1. Make Sure Backups Go Back Far Enough
Data loss that requires recovery from backups may take weeks or months to notice. That’s why it’s important to make sure your backups go back far enough (retained backups) so that you can recover data from before it was lost.
2. Tailor to Your Business Needs
Backups need to be matched to individual business requirements. An approach that works for one business may not be suitable for another. For example, backup or data retention requirements that are specified in business contracts or legislation should be the starting point for deciding which backups and retentions you need. This could specify a variety of factors that affect your decision about how/where to backup to (such as requirements for encryption, retention, accessibility, regional locality, and more).
3. Set up Backups in a Different Location
An effective way to protect your local infrastructure is to use a secure local backup device for fast recovery and a different location such as a cloud backup service for greater data security and longer retention. I’d also suggest backing up cloud infrastructure (such as Microsoft 365) to a different cloud. You don't want a failure that affects your data in a cloud service to also affect your backup data because it's in the same cloud service.
4. Never Assume
Don't assume that any cloud service, such as Microsoft 365, is backing up your data (unless of course the cloud service is a cloud backup service!). If a cloud service doesn’t have this measure in place, protection such as Area9’s Microsoft 365 Cloud Backup solution will need to fill the gap.
5. Encrypt and Physically Secure
Anyone that can access your backups can potentially access your data. That’s why all backups should be encrypted and physically secured to prevent unauthorised access. For example, don’t backup your PC to a USB drive that sits on your PC as anyone can take and use this to access your valuable business data.
6. Test Regularly
And finally, test often. Make sure you can restore data from your backups so that you know that they're working and can restore data quickly when you need to.
Want more advice on keeping your data secure? Area9 provides a range of data backup services and our team of experts are always happy to answer any questions you have. Get in touch today to learn more!