Regarding computer catastrophes, individuals often rely on backups as their go-to solution for restoring their data. However, for larger organisations, the effectiveness of backups in post-disaster scenarios is limited. On the other hand, organisations that have a well-structured and comprehensive disaster recovery process in place are able to swiftly restore operations. Both detailed backup and disaster recovery processes are crucial to recover from any mishap and minimize downtime swiftly.
In this article, we will go over the ins and outs of backups and disaster recovery and why both are essential for any business.
What is a Backup?
Backing up your data is the process of duplicating and storing it elsewhere as a restoration point in the event of system failure or catastrophe.
The data from a backup must be easily accessible for quick access to ensure easy recovery and mitigate downtime from system or infrastructure failure. This can be done in many ways — external drive storage, cloud backups, remote data centres, and storage arrays and partitions are just some of the ways to ensure your data is backed up.
Backing up is more on an individual level than an infrastructural level. Duplicating your entire system infrastructure is a massive undertaking that will consume a mass of resources, so isn’t suitable for most organisations.
However, for individual employee devices and file systems, backups are a vital way of ensuring that everyone is covered in case of disaster.
Backup Best Practices
You should employ multiple practices when implementing backups throughout your organisation.
• Follow the 3-2-1 rule: The 3-2-1 rule is a rule that helps ensure that you have multiple backups. To do so, you should make three unique backups on two devices, one of which should be stored off-site. This will ensure that you’re covered in every case that you can be.
• Encrypt Backup Data: Encrypting your backup data will ensure your organisation is secure and protected from anyone trying to access your data through backups.
• Backup Frequently: By failing to back up your data regularly, you increase the amount of time since your last restoration point — meaning that you’ll lose more data in the long run.
• Test Your Backups: Ensuring that your backups work is important; otherwise, they’re useless. This is why testing your backup is vital to ensuring you won’t be left in a tricky situation.
What is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery is a more complex process to ensure a plan to protect your data and services against problems and restore them in the event of a catastrophe. Backups are a part of this, but more goes into recovery than just creating backups.
Disaster recovery aims to get all aspects of your organisation up and running swiftly and effectively to ensure as little disruption and downtime as possible in the case of disaster. This means that there is far more to consider regarding recovery strategy.
Disaster Recovery Best Practices
There are many different things to consider when creating your disaster recovery plan. Here are a few of the best practices that are vital to ensuring that you lay the best foundation for your disaster recovery strategy —
• Strategise and plan: Creating a detailed plan backed with expert knowledge is key to ensuring that your disaster recovery strategy works for your organisation.
• Create stakeholders for key responsibilities: These responsibilities usually include IT Experts, Department heads, Senior Management, Human Resources, and Public Relations.
• Analyse your business: Business impact analysis (BIA) is about breaking down your organisation into individual assets and services. Planning for each one of these assets and services will ensure that there’s a plan for whatever has gone wrong.
• Determine your planning metrics: Calculating your recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) will help set expectations and plan contingencies for any downtime.
• Test your plan: Testing is vital to ensure your plan works. Making sure that your plan works seamlessly can be the difference between disaster and success.
Why Both Backup and Disaster Recovery Are Essential
Both backups and disaster recovery are crucial for any modern organisation. This is due to the different applications for which both methods account.
Backups are great for any individual within your organisation to have their data securely recoverable if their data or files become inaccessible. This accounts for device damage, data corruption, or anything else that could disrupt the accessibility of any given individual’s data within your organisation. Restoring a single user’s data from a backup is very simple and is regularly done by administrators worldwide.
Disaster recovery applies more so throughout your organisation, ensuring that there’s a plan in place for any system-wide failure or any disaster that could result in massive disruption or downtime. Because of this, disaster recovery is vital — and backups are one of the components of disaster recovery.
Ensuring that your organisation has backups and that they are rugularly checked can be key to ensuring that your organisation is protected from disaster.
Some facts and figures
Data Breaches: According to the 2021 Cost of a Data Breach Report by IBM Security, the average data breach cost in the UK was £2.88 million.
Business Continuity Planning: In a survey conducted by the British Chambers of Commerce in 2019, it was found that 93% of UK businesses had some form of business continuity plan in place.
Cloud Backup Adoption: Cloud backup solutions have been increasing in recent years. According to a survey conducted by the Cloud Industry Forum in 2020, 88% of UK organizations were using cloud services, with data backup being one of the primary use cases.
Cybersecurity Preparedness: The Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2021, conducted by the UK government, revealed that 46% of businesses in the UK had experienced a cybersecurity breach or attack in the previous 12 months. Effective backup and disaster recovery strategies are essential to recover from such incidents.
Secure Your Organisation’s Disaster Recovery Today
Backups and disaster recovery are vital parts of any organisation’s action plan to mitigate disruption and downtime in the case of any personal or organisational failure regarding systems and devices. With effective backups and disaster recovery plans, your organisation will be prepared to battle anything.
If you’re looking to start working out your organisation’s best steps forward for disaster recovery, reach out to us today.
Our expert team will be able to help ensure that your disaster recovery strategy is effective and works for your organisation’s needs.
Get in touch now and see how we can help your organisation.
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