Your organization’s information is valuable. Your clients are relying on you to ensure their confidential and even nonconfidential data is safe and recoverable. They trust that you will protect and back up the data regardless of any incident that may damage the primary copy of that data. Not being able to recover their data may result in loss of confidence in your organization and in loss of business.
Even if your data is outsourced to a third-party provider, you are responsible for ensuring that the safety and recoverability of the data meets your organization’s needs, no matter if the data is in multiple locations or in multiple formats.
Being able to recover from different types of incidents means first identifying the type of data that is critical, how it is backed up and how it will be recovered. For example, copies of the data that are air-gapped from the primary data helps protect your organization from cyberattacks such as ransomware. Without being able to recover data quickly, precious time and money are lost, and you have to spend dollars on recovery versus spending time on new development and new sales.
Next steps
- Select a backup tool: Choose a backup tool that allows for easy recovery and recovery testing. The reason you are backing up is for the reassurance that you can recover if/when it is necessary.
- Choose multiple tools, if necessary: Choosing multiple tools can help ensure multiple backups that are onsite or offsite, and those that are air-gapped, are safe from a malware intrusion.
- Ensure the backup allows for full recovery, not just file recovery: If the primary data center needs to be recovered at an alternate location, it may be necessary to recover to new hardware. Recoveries should be tested to the alternate data center.