Is Your Backup and Recovery Strategy Solid?

Does your business know how it takes data backups and restores data following a disaster? It’s one of the most important parts of managing a business, especially in a world where hackers and mistakes can happen in a moment’s notice. Do you know how to ensure that your business is as secure as possible in the event of a disaster? A good place to start is understanding the various terminology associated with data backup and disaster recovery.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
The Recovery Point Objective is a name for the amount of data that you can restore in the event of a disaster. The recovery point objective is determined by how much data can be saved following a data loss incident, be it an internally caused affair or one caused by external threat actors. The data loss could be caused by something as wild as a natural disaster (flood, fire, power surge), or unpredictable as user error or a hacking attack. Either way, you’re staring data loss in the face with no real guarantee of how much you can expect to lose.

The type of data backup you implement will have a major impact on how much you lose in the event of a disaster. For example, tape backup has long been a staple in the business environment, but it’s not the ideal way to approach disaster recovery in a loss scenario. Tape backup is resource-intensive and can only happen once a day during your business’s off-hours. This means that you could potentially lose an entire day’s worth of data in the event of a disaster--much more than if you were to implement a cloud-based backup system.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
Once you have found out what portion of your data you can recover in the event of a data loss incident, you’ll be able to determine an adequate recovery time objective, or RTO. You want to have a clear idea of how long it will take to get back in action following a major data loss incident. Any time that your business isn’t operating as usual is time that’s not being spent productive--downtime, also known as one of the most dangerous things for any business in the wake of a critical data loss incident.

Your goal should be to minimize downtime whenever possible, which includes ditching your tape backup solution and replacing it with one which allows for a quick and efficient restoration process. Cloud-based backup allows for minimum downtime by allowing for automatic backups every fifteen minutes. It’s just one way that BDR can allow for maximum recovery with minimal downtime and loss on your business’s part.

Does your business need to implement a more dynamic data backup and disaster recovery system? A cloud-based BDR is the answer. To learn more, reach out to us at 607.433.2200.